Successful OSS Project Design and Implementation

Requirements, Tools, Social Designs and Reward Structures

Hind Benbya, Nassim Belbaly

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780566087950
• eBook ISBN: 9781317048633
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Computer Science

The open source phenomenon has attracted an increased interest among commercial firms and governments. It is becoming one of the most influential paradigm shifts not only in software development but in social and economic value creation as well. While software development is perhaps the most prominent example of open source, its principles have now been applied across a wide range of product classes, industries and even scientific disciplines. Decision makers at different levels and in a variety of fields need to improve their understanding of the factors that contribute to the Open Source Software (OSS) effectiveness: approaches, tools, social designs, reward structures and metrics. Successful OSS Project Design and Implementation provides a state-of-the-art analysis of OSS design principles, their emergence and success and how they are extending well beyond the domain of software.

PART I
OSS Emergence and Development

Over the past decade, there has been a phenomenal increase in the adoption of open source software (OSS) by both firms and governments. OS is largely recognized today as an alternative way of developing and distributing software of high quality with relatively lower costs. Today, many large multinational firms such as IBM, HP and Sun Microsystems, to name just a few examples, dedicate substantial resources and sponsor developers to contribute to OSSP.

Even Microsoft, which has traditionally been hostile to the entire open source model, now realizes that important technological innovations can be developed in conjunction with the open source community. Recently, the company has assigned formal executive responsibilities for open source strategy and has established a staff to assist with outbound and inbound open source software. Yet, the entire OSS movement is a product of technologically oriented individuals primarily motivated by goals other than economic.

The free/open source movement initially started in the 1970s as a kind of ideology against proprietary software, campaigning for users’ freedom and for making all software free of intellectual property restrictions. This movement has evolved considerably in recent years. It’s still working towards most of the same ideological values; however, it takes a much more pragmatic approach advancing the economic and technical merits of OSS over its moral or ethical principles. Lately, with the increasing number of companies sponsoring OSSP, it has become clear that this movement is taking a new path with some even predicting its shift to a commercial product.

In this part, the three chapters provide a different but complementary view on the evolution of the OSS movement. The first chapter, Principles of Distributed Innovation, illustrates the principles characterizing OSS communities and how they have been applied to other domains. The second chapter, Firms’ Participation in FOSS, describes how OSS has evolved from communities of developers to firms and how firms participate in different ways to OSSP.

Chapter 3, OSS in the Public Sector, summarizes the results of a survey on OSS adoption by public administrations in Emilia-Romagna.

1
The Principles of Distributed Innovation

Karim Lakhani and Jill Panetta

“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else” is known as Joy’s Law in the high-tech industry. Attributed to Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, this “law” emphasizes the essential knowledge problem that faces many enterprises today; that is, that in any given sphere of activity most of the pertinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any one organization, and the central challenge for those charged with the innovation mission is to find ways to access that knowledge.

The causal explanation of Joy’s Law is provided in the seminal work of economists Friedrich Hayek and Eric von Hippel on the distributed and sticky nature of knowledge and innovation. Hayek (1945), arguing for the importance of the market economy, emphasized that at the macro level knowledge is unevenly distributed in society, and that centralized models for economic planning and coordination are prone to failure due to an inability to aggregate this distributed knowledge. Thirty years later, micro-level studies by von Hippel (2005) began to suggest that in many industries users were the originators of most novel innovations. Users’ dominant role in originating innovations reflects the fact that knowledge is not only distributed but also “sticky,” that is, relatively difficult and extremely costly to move between locations, thus shifting the locus of innovation to where it is the stickiest (von Hippel 1994). Users generate functionally novel innovations because they experience novel needs well ahead of manufacturers, and manufacturers develop dimension of merit innovations (that improve the performance of existing features) because they specialize in producing products for the mass market.1 Joy’s Law is exacerbated by the explosion of knowledge in most scientific and technological fields. In the online database of the US National Library of Medicine (Medline), for example, between 1955 and 2005, the number of academic papers published in the life sciences increased approximately six-and-one-half-fold, from 105,000 to 686,000.2 Even in relatively narrow and obscure fields, tissue engineering for instance, 6,131 academic publications were authored by 17,044 individuals between 2004 and 2006.3 In the face of this explosion of knowledge, most organizations will have difficulty keeping up with significant trends and identifying and locking up key sources of knowledge for competitive gain. Joy’s Law is thus not so much a statement about the declining IQs of workers or poor hiring practices as an acknowledgement that the traditionally closed models of proprietary innovation will have difficulty completing knowledge-intensive tasks when most of the needed knowledge resides outside the organization. The successful development of the Linux operating system and numerous other open source software (OSS) projects provides an alternative model for organizing for innovation. Many practitioners and scholars of innovation did not anticipate the emergence of a distributed and open model for innovation that can aggressively compete with traditionally closed and proprietary models. That complex software systems running mission critical applications can be designed, developed, maintained, and improved for “free” by a virtual “community” of mostly volunteer computer programmers has come as a great surprise to them. Perhaps even more surprising is that some of the largest software companies and the biggest holders of intellectual property (for example, IBM, Sun, Apple, and Oracle) have embraced OSS communities by encouraging the participation of their own personnel in, and donating copyrighted software and patents to, these communities, and integrating OSS software into their strategic product and service offerings.

OSS communities are the most fully developed example of the appearance of distributed innovation systems characterized by decentralized problem solving, self-selected participation, self-organizing coordination and collaboration, “free” revealing of knowledge, and hybrid organizational models that blend community with commercial success. The achievements of OSS communities have brought the distributed innovation model to general attention, but it is rapidly taking hold in industries as diverse as apparel and clothing, encyclopedias, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, and music and entertainment.

In this chapter, we first provide an overview of distributed innovation systems that are achieving success in three different industries with three different organizational models. We then consider in the context of these three examples questions and concerns related to why people participate, the organizing principles of production, and the implications for intellectual property. We close our discussion with a review of potential extensions and limitations of this alternative model of innovation.

Models for Distributed Innovation

THE SELF-ORGANIZING COMMUNITY

Linux invariably comes to mind when OSS communities are mentioned. Its organizational and commercial success has stunned most observers. Linux’s growth from just over 10,000 lines of code at its inception to about four million lines of code as of the latest version reflects the contributions of thousands of individuals (Amor-Iglesias et al. 2005). In 2007, 1,961 developers added 754,000 lines of code.4 The commercial ecosystem that surrounds Linux was expected to reach about US$35 billion in 2008 with installations in more than 43 million computing devices ranging from PCs and servers to cell phones, routers, DVRs and super computer clusters.5 Its beginnings belie the contemporary scope and value of this global movement. Linux’s genesis in 1991, in the pre-Web era of the Internet, was a series of announcements and requests for help posted by then 22-year-old Linus Torvalds on a message board for computer operating systems.6

Hello netlanders, Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on an OS you can try to modify for your needs? … :-)

I’m doing a (free) operating system, just a hobby, won’t be big and professional… I’d like any feedback on things people like/dislike … This is a program for hackers by a hacker. I’ve enjoyed doing it, and somebody might enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs … Drop me a line if you are willing to let me use your code.

Linus ([email protected])

These announcements set in motion a loose, informal collaboration that led to the establishment of a framework for interaction among the global community of software developers that created the Linux kernel (the core of a computer operating system). As Torvalds’ messages make clear, the initial drivers of participation in Linux were user need and fun. The promise of Linux was of a powerful Unix-like operating system, previously available only on high-end hardware that could run on commodity Intel hardware. Because it was available on the Internet, users could download the source code to their own computers and modify it to suit their needs and interests. Modifications made to the source code were then sent back to Torvalds in the hope that they would be included in the next release of the kernel. The growing community established its own Internet-based discussion forums and began to work collaboratively to resolve technical issues related to Linux development. Although over the past 16 years the number of people and firms interested in Linux has continued to grow, the basic model of participation on the basis of user need or curiosity and having fun has not changed. To participate one need only sign up for the Linux kernel mailing list (LKML) and be competent to modify source code. LKML is the rendezvous point for technical discussions of the features being developed by contributors. LKML participants report and fix bugs, contribute and modify code, and discuss the technical evolution of the kernel.

Although Torvalds has final say as to what goes into the kernel, much of the development is organic, determined by the actions of community members and not by any measure of explicit project management within the community. Torvalds’ philosophy regarding management of the community runs counter to most expectations of how complex technological projects should be run. A recent debate within LKML highlights the issues.7

Rik van Riel (an active contributor to Linux):

“It seems like Linux really isn’t going anywhere in particular and seems to make progress through sheer luck.”

Linus Torvalds (in several emails in a longer thread):

“Hey, that’s not a bug, that’s a FEATURE

Well, sheer luck, AND:

• free availability and crosspollination through sharing of ‘source code,’ although biologists call it DNA.

• a rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this ‘survival of the fittest’)

• massive undirected parallel development (‘trial and error’)

Do I direct some stuff? Yes. But, quite frankly, so do many others. Alan, Al, David, even you. And a lot of companies are part of the evolution whether they realize it or not. And all the users end up being part of the ‘fitness testing’…

A strong vision and a sure hand sound good on paper. It’s just that I have never met a technical person (including me) whom I would trust to know what is really the right thing to do in the long run…

Too strong a strong vision can kill you — you’ll walk right over the edge firm in the knowledge of the path in front of you…

I’d much rather have ‘brownian motion,’ where a lot of microscopic directed improvements end up pushing the system slowly in a direction that none of the individual developers really had the vision to see on their own. And I’m a firm believer that in order for this to work well, you have to have a development group that is fairly strange and random.”

Most managers would balk at developing complex technological artifacts with the help of “fairly strange and random” individuals. But Torvalds and Linux show the potential benefit of organizing work such that many individuals can self-select and lead elements of development without much ex-ante guidance and control.

BLENDING COMMUNITY AND COMMERCE

Threadless.com foreshadows the commercial enterprise of the future, that is, built to leverage community-based distributed innovation. Firms in the apparel and fashion business face two critical challenges:

1. to attract the right designer talent at the right time to create recurring fashion hits, and

2. to forecast sales so as to be better able to match production cycles with demand cycles.

Threadless solves these problems by letting its international community of customers take over such core functions as innovation, new product development, sales forecasting, and marketing.

Threadless was started in 2000 by childhood friends Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart who were active participants in a Chicago-based online community of designers called Dreamless. The experience of winning a T-shirt design competition sponsored by the Dreamless community exposed Nickell, and by association his friend DeHart, to the idea that co-creation with a community was a relatively untapped market. B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Editors
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I OSS EMERGENCE AND DEVELOPMENT
• PART II OSS REWARDS’ AND INCENTIVES’ STRUCTURE
• PART III OSS SUCCESS, MEASUREMENT AND METRICS
• Index