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| Zen And The Art Of Open Source |
September 2, 2004 |
By Jim Harris
Microsoft has long sat on top of the software industry, its products literally running most modern businesses. But that dominance is being threatened by the open-source software movement, a challenge other businesses and institutions could soon find themselves sharing.
In general, open source refers to software created as a collaborative effort by an ad hoc group of developers, and for which the source code is made available.
This has proved to be a very successful model. The popularity of the Linux operating system is only growing and a July 2004 survey of 52 million Web sites conducted by Netcraft found that Apache, an open-source server, is being used by 70 per cent of sites. Microsoft products have only 22 per cent market share. When you buy a Microsoft product you don’t get access to the source code, the guts of how the program works. That’s like buying a car with the hood locked down; if anything goes wrong you’re dependent on the vendor to fix the problem.
By contrast, with open source you can open the hood, see how the program works and change it. Or you can hire programmers to make modifications.
If Microsoft has one or two thousand programmers working on its code, there are now more than one million active open-source programmers worldwide. As a result, the open-source movement is developing more robust programs, that have fewer bugs, are more secure, and are less susceptible to attacks, and when there are security breaches they are repaired faster.
THE OPEN-SOURCE PHILOSOPHY
And this approach is applicable elsewhere. Robert McEwen, president of Canadian gold mining firm Goldcorp, once attended an executive development seminar at MIT which highlighted open-source case studies.
McEwen returned to Goldcorp thinking of how to apply those insights to mining. Geologists and seismic engineers are historically very secretive with data. So in March 2000, McEwen posted the firm’s entire geological database for its Red Lake mine, including all drilling and seismic results, on its Web site. It then invited experts from around the globe to examine the data and suggest mining locations, and backed it all up with awards worth $250,000.
The response was tremendous. First off, McEwen places the value of this consulting, analysis and insight to Goldcorp at $3 million. Secondly, it challenged Goldcorp staff to upgrade their skills. When Australian students provided 3D models of where to mine, and the staff didn’t know how to use the modeling software, Goldcorp staff got busy up-skilling. Today Goldcorp’s geologists use 3D software, greatly enhancing their ability to visualize and model their mining efforts and better target exploration. Third, the submissions generated more than 100 new exploration targets. Goldcorp brought new meaning to the term data mining.
PUSH-BACK
The open-source concept is simple to understand but it isn’t easy to apply. Why? Because it’s akin to Coca Cola publishing its secret recipe and letting everyone in the world, including Pepsi, see it. The greatest resistance to adopting this philosophy is the traditional business mindset. At the root of embracing an open-source philosophy are a number of assumptions or beliefs that most western managers have difficulty accepting:
The people who best know how to solve problems are the ones who are closest to them: customers, suppliers, vendors, anyone in the value chain. A company’s staff can never have all the answers. Customers must drive the development process. It’s no problem to let competitors see our development process, because we will develop faster than they can and in a more elegant fashion.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and open source empowers customers to develop solutions to the problems they face. So development happens in a massively parallel, concurrent way. By definition it is unorganized, chaotic and redundant, not words that executives would normally get excited about in describing their R&D process. In other words, the reasons for embracing the open-source philosophy are counterintuitive. At the root of this decentralized, grass roots organizing philosophy is “letting go of control.” And driven executives are typically type A or double A personalities: they thrive on control.
Management theory is great, but it is only in adopting an open-source philosophy that people really understand the benefits: by letting go of control the open-source philosophy unleashes tremendous power. How can Microsoft, with only thousands of developers in Redmond, Wash., improve its products faster than open source products which empower more than a million active open-source programmers?
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