The promise of Open Source
The Open Source movement has shown that loose groups of people, each working of their own accord on whatever they feel is important or interesting, can create great software. Not only has this worked for small hobby projects, but also for huge well known projects such as Linux, Firefox and OpenOffice.
It used to be hard to imagine that anything serious could be build without the creation of large hierarchical organizations. But if one thing has really been shown in these recent years, it is that self-organizing groups in many cases can outperform traditional organizations.
There is a lot of talk in the community about the various freedoms that open source confers. But beneath all this there is a titillating promise of an even more fundamental freedom. This is “the real freedom zero”:
If you do not have this basic freedom, all the others are really irrelevant.
The central dilemma of Open Source is, and has always been, how to make a living doing it. And so far all the proposed solutions seems to have been a surrender of the right of the individual to choose his own work.
Whether the idea is to create a company that offers support, or maybe go to work for a big company that has an interest in improving the product, you will always end up with a boss who has the final say in what you should work on. Of course you might be lucky that it (at least for a time) overlaps with what you are passionate about, but the decision is out of your hands.
Very very few people are in a position where someone is willing to pay them for just following their passions and doing whatever they find most rewarding. For most people (if they even have had the opportunity to find their passion), this has to be delegated to a hobby they can do in their free time, while they make their living in a day job.
Is this really what we wish for? Working all day in more or less boring jobs to bring bread on the table, and then only hacking on what you are passionate about in your precious free time, where you should really be with friends and family.
You could say that this must be how it is meant to be. How could it be otherwise, when the commonly inferred meaning of the word “work”, is to be doing something you don’t really want to do, to make a living? And isn’t this how it is, and always have been, for everybody?
But this is ignoring the long history of the human race. If you look to anthropology you will see that we spend the overwhelming part of our history as tribal bands of hunter-gatherers, where nobody really had the means to force others work for them. Indeed many tribal societies have been found where the whole concept of “work” is non-existent. They simply don’t have a word for it.
It was not until the agricultural revolution, that it really became possible for individuals to amass a surplus of resources, which made it possible to pay (and force) others to work for them.
There is a very good case to be made for the fact that we are not very well evolutionarily adapted to work for others (with others yes, but not for others), and we only have to look around us to see that it causes a lot of misery. This was what Thoreau alluded to when he stated that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”.
So this brings us back to the freedom to decide our own work. How do we make this titillating promise become reality? How do we make it possible for individuals to freely work together, just working on what they personally find important, while still making a safe living?
The Way it Ought to Be
One, not very optimal, solution could be starting your own one person company, producing and selling proprietary software (as I and many others have done). This ensures that you are the only one deciding what to do, but it also has several problems.
First of all you are only a single person. This means that you have to do all the work, also the work that you don’t find interesting (but you might find it important enough to want to do it anyways). Also, you are yourself a liability to the company. If anything happens to you, everything stops (as it happened for me when I had some family issues that meant development stopped for several months).
Second, there is still a fundamental disrespect for your customers, who in a very real sense are also taking part in the company. They get a locked down product which they cannot study, or modify beyond what you have explicitly provided for. And while they may be doing a lot of activities that are hugely beneficial for the company (offering support on the forum, word of mouth, sending bug reports, etc..), they get no real reward for their efforts.
Fixing the product issue, is fortunately quite easy. Just give the users the source of the application. Then they can study and modify it to their needs, and if they want to, share their modifications with each other. A simple release form can make them share the ownership of the changes with the company so that they can be included in future versions (without making them loose any rights).
The Open Company
The real question is how to make the users real participants in the company. There is a lot more to be done than just coding. Everything from support to design and marketing could in principle be opened up to free participation. Obviously there are some things where mistakes could have seriously adverse effects on the company, but this is where it would be appropriate with levels of certification (maybe shown kind of like stackoverflow’s badges).
Imagine you had a company like this. Totally open. No concept of bosses or employees. Anyone could join in at any time, doing whatever task they found interesting, for whatever time they found appropriate. How could you possibly find a way to compensate them fairly?
The key is in a technology called Trust Metrics. In essence this is a technique for rating each other, but with the key distinction that the way ratings are calculated makes cheating ineffective. This is a new technology, which has not been applied for this purpose before, but it has already proven itself as the underlying principle behind such well known technologies as Googles pagerank and the certifications on Advogato.
By basing the compensation on continuous rating by your peers, it becomes possible to start out by just participating a bit in your free time, and then gradually, as your ratings increase, spend more and more time on the project. It may eventually come to fully supplanting your day job, becoming your primary source of income, or you may choose to just keep it as something you do on the side. And not only can nobody stop you from participating, there is nobody who can fire you either. This makes it a far more secure way to make a living, where your status is solely dependent on your own ability and effort, rather than on arbitrary decisions from some superior.
You could question the fairness of being rated by your peers like this, but keep in mind that the way it is done in companies now, is pretty much completely opaque, with some boss judging you in a pretty much arbitrary manner. At least here you will have full disclosure of why and how you are being rated. Also, it is not completely unprecedented. There are companies like W.L.Gore, which for decades has used peer ratings as the sole basis for compensation. But they have obviously not been open for free participation.
Making It Real
Throughout time, many people have brought up more or less utopian plans for ways to make a living. But if they are never realized, it really amounts to nothing more than hot air. So to make this real, I am putting my company (from which i currently make my living) on the line. Over the next few months I will gradually be transforming the company of the e text editor into an Open Company.
Since this is an established company, which already has an accomplished product and a large userbase, it has a good base to build on. Therefore the transformation will have to be done step-by-step:
1st step: Releasing the source
The source will be made a available, so that users can study and modify the application for their own needs. If they want to contribute their changes back, they can submit them for review. To discourage piracy, a tiny but essential core (also containing the licensing code), will be kept private (at least until users reach a certain rating). This will gradually be followed by a similar opening of the rest of the company (web site, documentation, bug tracking, etc..)
2nd step: Building the Trust Metric
The basic infrastructure will be set up so that participants can start rating each other. The algorithms and code will be released as open source, so that they can be studied and discussed (and used by others). It will probably need quite some time and tweaking before we reach a fair balance.
3rd step: Compensating Participants
All income in the company (minus operating expenses), will be passed through the trust metric and distributed to participants.
The Future
Throughout the entire process, I will be blogging about the experience and the individual parts of the transformation. This is kind of a grand experiment, but my hope would be that it can inspire others to either join in and participate, or form their own open companies, so even more opportunities are created.
The end goal is to make “the real freedom zero” a reality. Creating a future where everybody has the opportunity to find (or start) one or more open companies in alignment with their passions, and make a living doing what they love.
If you want to participate in this, join us on the forum, and help us shape the future.
Update: First step is complete. The source has been released.
March 24th, 2009 at 7:59 am
Wow. That’s courageous, I think.
I mean putting your own running company at stake… not everyone would do that.
March 24th, 2009 at 8:35 am
This is a wonderful concept, I’ve thought about similar ideas in the past and would love to see this work.
I hope the effort pays off for you!
March 24th, 2009 at 9:53 am
Who will do the unpleasant jobs in the business, say, cleaning the bathroom or cold calling or arranging financing, and how will they be compensated, by the same rating system?
Well, none of those are an issue in the company as it is now, and I don’t expect it to become so in the future (the benefits of running a virtual company with low overheads). But obviously there are some activities that are less attractive than others.
I expect that there will be some participants who will identify enough with the company that they are willing to do those tasks when they show up (I know I will feel that way), especially if their income increases when the company is succesfull.
March 24th, 2009 at 10:50 am
This is a very interesting idea, I will definitely be watching to see how this pans out.
My only question to this is: How do you compensate contributors from a legal standpoint? Are you treating people as 1099 contractors? Have you thought this part of an Open Business through yet, I would be very interested and I may follow a similar path in the future.
From a legal standpoint the participants will be independent contractors.
March 24th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
What about your competitors who try to kill your project by simply creating a situation where the overhead of ranking performance makes doing so implausible even for “good” workers. Think death by a thousand wounds.
On an entirely unrelated note, where do I sign up?
Ranking participants will be a very low overhead activity. There is no need for everybody to rate everybody. You just rate those whose work you have noticed. The main benefit of trust metrics is their attack resistance which protects against exactly this kind of situations.
To sign up, just join the forum and start taking part in the community. More ways to interact will follow.
March 24th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
This sounds very interesting. I’m currently running a startup and I’ve been thinking about ways to make it a good business to work for when we have money to hire staff. I’ll be following your progress and will consider implementing something similar if this works out.
Good luck!
March 24th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Very interesting idea and much kudos to you for believing in it enough to go through with it. I will be very interested in how it all pans out and wish you the best. I hope it is an amazing success and more companies can follow your lead!
I think it will only work for certain industries (with low overheads and low requirements for upfront capital) and certain types of people (well motivated people who are good at what they do) but I think (and hope) that it can work really well in those situtions.
Again, kudos!
March 24th, 2009 at 1:54 pm
I like the idea of starting the open source company with something like a text editor. I look forward to joining in when other projects become available. I am also curious how you will compensate harder working employees proportionally.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
So, let me get this straight: you want the unpaid (at least at the beginning) participation that open source projects get, but only open part of the code so you still can charge people for the final product.
This is a great idea, either (A) to make and distribute money while still keep the knowledge in the code open or (B) to rip of participants and get coding done for free. Which one it is only time can tell.
But still, great idea, best of luck.
Since the process is totally transparent, it wouldn’t take long for all participants to leave if they didn’t feel they got their fair share for their work. So there is quite an incentive to keep it fair.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
Please, do yourself a favour and read ‘Selfish Gene’. Your idea of open company will be killed easily by just two participants who will co-operate behind the scene and cheat on you. They will rank each other high enough to siphon all the benefits. For your company to survive and evolve, it must be stable and have an evolutionary mechanism to weed out all of the cheaters. The corporate and business laws have evolved for that very reason - to provide a stable environment (however unjust it might be).
The sad truth is that only trully open-source projects are stable and they will inherit the earth eventually putting all other commodity software giants up for sale. Good luck!
I can recommend reading up a bit on trust metrics. This is exactly the kind of problem they were invented to defend against. Even if hundreds of users banded together (easy to do with fake profiles, aka sock-puppets), they would only form their own loop and not attain any real rating.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:21 pm
You mention respect for your customers near the beginning of the article, but that’s the last we hear about the people who are paying the bills.
It’s relatively easy for me to find personally meaningful tasks, but much harder to find someone who will pay me for them.
It’s much the same thing with companies. There are plenty of failed businesses that offered products of which they were (perhaps justly) proud but that failed to find a marketplace for them.
I’m interested to know how you intend to align the goals of your employees with those of your customers.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Sounds great, an Open Company. Will definitely follow up.
Concerning rankings & trust metrics:
Trust metrics for distribution of income will lead to a pyramid scheme / MLM scheme. I propose alternate work / use metrics.
People should get money based on work they actually do [stuff they actually sell] and redistribute an amount of their choice (but not less than - let’s say - 5-10%) towards people of their choice working on projects they USE. This will allow some people to focus on customer / corporate / money based project infrastructure, while behind you have a whole eco-system doing open source tool development.
Also please use a wikify the original proposal and post the link.
All the best,
Chip
March 24th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Wow, this is really putting your money where you mouth is. As a software engineer for 35 years, I’d certainly like to see you succeed. It looks like you’ve got a solid product to start with.
The biggest question I have is on predictability. Some companies have tried to deliver products/features on a loose schedule of “when its done”. And I think most of them (all that I know of anyway) have been unsuccessful. I think of 3drealms and their game ‘Duke Nuk’em Forever.” They’ve been at it for 8 years when the typical release cycle for a AAA grade video game is more like 2 - 3 years. And I can’t count the number of large consulting projects that I have been on where feature creep, uninformed project managers and underinvested programmers have killed projects that simply became OBE.
Of course e is not as complex as all that, but still your customers are going to have a certain expectation of progress. It seems that projects which have predictable milestones (I’m thinking here more along the lines of Agile-style iterations rather than SDLC-style project milestones).
Somewhere along the line push will come to shove and long hours will have be to put in to get “it” out the door, whether that’s new features or products. How will your metrics address that?
BTW, here’s hoping you succeed and I’m going to join the forum and see where it goes from there myself.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
I can’t pass up the opportunity to participate. I’m kind of a generalist: lots of experience in Windows/*nix, IP networking, SANs, etc. Point me in a direction.
Thanks,
Chaz
March 24th, 2009 at 2:29 pm
My co-owners and I have much the same thoughts about you, though in our case we were not as bold. We incorporated as a worker cooperative so our workplace is completely controlled by the employees of the company, but membership is not open and requires a capital investment. So right now there is nothing set up for casual contributors, but it seemed to us there would be logistical issues in distributing work that we didn’t have a good handle on. I’ll be following your progress, and wish you the best! Hopefully we’ll be able to adopt some of your practices if they are successful!
March 24th, 2009 at 2:35 pm
I’m not saying I don’t see problems with this. But I am saying it sounds like a really novel idea.
All new things have inherent difficulties to overcome - these are the difficulties which prevent them from being *old* things already. Some look at this project and say it will never work. I’m sure some said that about Wikipedia, too, and regardless of what problems it may still have, it’s unabashedly successful.
Best of luck, I’m keen to get a look inside of E - but I’m even keener to see where this takes you!
March 24th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
this is incredible, admirable, and long overdue. I just quit a lucrative, secure job with a well respected tech company due to the unethical, unaccountable, and arbitrary actions of my so-called superiors. Most of whom aren’t half as good at their jobs as the peope they manage are.
I’m not a coder yet, but I have insanely great customer service, troubleshooting, and interpersonal skills. Hopefully I can find some way to contribute, if for mo other reason than to support this monumental shift in consciousness regarding the basic concept of work and how it relates to our lives.
Kudos.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
This sounds like a great idea. I was curious as to whether or not your “trust network” will be only localized or if it will be a large global trust network of “open workers”. If it were a globalized network I think the benefits could be huge (any employer being able to search for highly respected C programmers for example). Trust could be built up through several different companies and overall competence will stand out with more quickly and easily given more sample data. When the idea of the Open Company takes off, having a database of workers at their disposal would be a huge plus for any new businesses.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
whats to keep the pay roll guy from paying himself everything and everyone else nadda?
That would quickly make all the participants leave, and then we are kinda back to square one.
March 24th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
co-operative anyone?
March 24th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
FYI, the Metagovernment project may be modeling you for the larger purpose of open source governance:
http://www.metagovernment.org/
Of course, everyone is welcome to join.
P.S. Notes on your project here:
http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/Open_company
March 24th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
I guess it’s one step close to what the zietgiest movie / venus project proposes… “A resource based economy”
@jojo… one does not have to do what they like/love harder. The incentives to work are different in this case (@ least IMHO)
March 24th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Very interesting idea. I too would like to see how this all works out. I have often envisioned software development projects that compensated workers by the amount they contribute to the project in the form of royalties payed out from the revenue of sales.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
You may want to have a look at the great and free “The Ascent of Humanity” book:
http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/text.php
It is right up your alley.
Steven
March 24th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
This is awesome!
I really do wish all the luck in the world to be very successful with it!
March 24th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
I am very skeptical of the final outcome, but I intend to support this idea with reckless abandon. I’d love to know that you (and subsequently your fellow contributors) are successful. I don’t program at all, so how I would fit in your grand scheme eludes me; but consider me “in”. If nothing else I could dress up in a Statue of Liberty costume with a sign that reads, USE e TEXT EDITOR. I wish all of you the best of luck.
March 24th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
We toyed with the idea of an open company for a long time till we lost courage to do it. Would love to see how your idea progresses. Like any open source project, I think there is a need for a core group which always make a major contribution. And my suggestion is to have a ‘minimal top mgmt’
March 24th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
As a long time developer, I can tell you that if you do this, achieve an open company as described, I’m all yours!!!!
March 24th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Great for independents, but not necessarily so great for clients if you’re a service company.
I, as a client, want to know the history and experience of those working on my project. I want subsequent work to be done by (at least some of) the same people – otherwise who holds the institutional memory? And how are future projects enhanced by lessons learned from early iterations?
This is exactly where you see the benefit of an open company vs. a traditional company. In an open company you can track exactly who is doing what and all the experience is public knowledge (captured in code, wiki pages, blog postings and forum discussions).
Compare this with a traditional company where they often only have to loose one or two “gurus”, and most of their deeper experience is gone.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
To the point that someone made above regarding who will do the less desirable jobs, I think if the ranking system can identify the less desirable jobs and maybe rank the folks that are willing to take those up higher (or give them extra credit for that), I am sure many individuals will be willing to take these up.
I don’t think this compromises the idea of “complete freedom” since the individuals that want to do the less desirable jobs for extra credit will be doing so at there own free will.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
This is a very interesting concept indeed, although I have to admit I don’t think it will really work. I hope it does though, so good luck!
March 24th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
An interesting idea. However, one potential problem is the disconnect between the things your peers value and the things the market values.
You might get into a situation where things your peers value very little are paying the bills, and the people responsible for such things get very little from their efforts.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
My first thought was “well, that’s fine as long as all the players are diligent about documentation” but of course that’s an issue in a traditional company as well.
I do love the idea of an open company - I wish you the best, and will eagerly follow your progress.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
A clarification please. I may be being dense.
Is this to be an Open Company developing and selling non-Open Software/
all the best,
drew
Yes, the software will not be under an open source license, but the source will be available and users will be free to study, modify (and even fork) it as they like. The whole point is to reach the balance where both the freedoms of the users and of the developers are equally respected.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
I’m interested to see how you scheme out your “to do lists”
Are you going to post somewhere on your website a list of things to accomplish by priority, and also how to you communicate to those involved what is where. I am skeptical to the extent that I see the ideal of this project, but I as well would like offer any assistance I can.
March 24th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
I can’t believe how many people are hijacking the term “open source”, without actually doing it:
“To discourage piracy, a tiny but essential core (also containing the licensing code), will be kept private (at least until users reach a certain rating).”
This breaks freedoms one, two and three:
The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
It also contradicts the Open Source definition:
1. Free Redistribution
The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
2. Source Code
The program must include source code, and must allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form.
What you are doing is admirable and courageous, but please don’t steal the words and the ideas of freedom and of open source, and then turn it into something else.
I think that you are reading words into the article that are not there. Nowhere do I state that the product will be (or aspire to be) open source. What I am saying is that we should learn from open source, and try to apply the lessons learned to enable some even more fundamental freedoms.
March 24th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
For whatever its worth, I really and deeply love this idea and which you the best of luck. If this concept takes off, the world will be a better place!
And even if not, it will still at least gain an even better Best Text Editor Out There.
By the way, will this enable a Linux version of E?
Yes, the source does compile on Linux and just need a few improvements to be complete.
March 24th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
How do you deal with some of the pathological cases:
1. Someone who is destructive and will not go away.
2. Someone who is contributing but is for some reason ( say lack of social graces ) is not compensated fairly ?
???
This might be a little like measuring progress with lines of code. It works great as long as no one cheats. It is so easy to cheat that it is almost impossible to avoid.
And how do you interface with an external structure that is
confused when there is a lack of or a non-traditional structure,
something like the IRS or the city where you need a business license?
Destructive users will be dealt with just like in most other online communities, by their accounts being closed by moderators (which will probably end up being everybody with a high enough trust rating).
Nobody is mindreaders, so if there are participants who are doing work that is completely invisible to the community, and they are not able to communicate why it is valuable, then there is not much chance that they will be compensated. Just like in real life.
As far as for interaction with external authorities, it will be just like a traditional company (just one that uses a lot of independent contracters).
March 24th, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Talking about open companies is the same thing as talking about anarchism or specifically anarchocommunism. Have you read Kropotkin?
March 24th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Hi all,
I’m a freelancer in a group of freelacers named GNU Networks. We are almost what you want to be right now.
We started working this way 6 years ago, with the idea of becoming a corp some day, however, we decided this year to turn it a bit more open.
Our model has these differences with yours:
- Everybody is a freelancer, so taxes and billing is never a problem and everybody takes care of its own legal stuff.
- We are not open to everybody, just to people we already know and trust: 1st we drink some beer, then we can work together.
- We don’t need any model to know how much cash will everyone get, we know each one’s rates and we talk and deal
We share website, development/testing servers, CRM, email domain and brand. That is all!
The certification thing and so it’s exactly the same: show us your certifications and let us see what can you do
However, you are a product-based company, and we are a services one. In our case is much easier to be like this, as projects are quite short.
The really important thing in biz is to have a good team and a well known brand, so, we thought in how to make these two points as huge as possible and we ran this way
I see it’s harder to switch from your position than ours. Just to make it clear, I don’t think it would be enough with certification, in business you need to trust your mates. Imagine that a mafia-spammer enters into your biz and adds a backdoor into your software to let him control your customer’s PCs: that would be the end of your brand…
Cheers!
Kenneth
March 24th, 2009 at 9:55 pm
I will sign with blood any contract, and give you my soul and my first son if you let me join this company.
Nothing to add.:D
March 24th, 2009 at 10:52 pm
Hi, I built and ran a successful company for many years, along the lines of freeform and reward for contribution. The idea was that
1. most people want to feel as though they are making a difference and this is a better motivator than fear or money.
2. Let customers and suppliers directly participate in the operations of the company
sounds simple but the resultant implementation was a very long way away from how most businesses run, it worked though and I wouldn’t have missed that experience for anything.
I hope you have a ball with this
March 24th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Two acid tests to show whether this is viable:
1) other open-source projects that have become profitable ventures (with or without trust metrics)
2) whether you are able to do it yourself.
“Trust-metrics” will not be the deciding factor. Look at rock bands. They have a similar structure to what you propose. How long do they last? How few last? How few succeed?
I hope your scheme pans out and you hit pure gold. Good luck.
March 25th, 2009 at 1:23 am
No offense, but I predict “fail”.
The questions raised about customer vs. developer values are extremely valid questions. “The freedom to decide what you want to work on” is not an efficient business strategy. Not only will you end up with features left unimplemented because nobody wants to put in the work, you will be left with popular features being reimplemented three or four times by multiple people all wanting to reap the rewards. Software projects need a command structure that defies the very freedom in the above quote. Working on what you want rivals the simple act of “getting stuff done”.
More importantly, this just seems like a cheap ploy to generate buzz and get work done for the equivalent of sweat shop wages. I call this the “Stack Overflow” effect: bribing people with “rewards” and “recognition” in order to have people devote abnormal amounts of time to your project. “Look, I’ll give you a badge if you work 1 hour a day– how cool is that! Oh, and don’t stop working, someone will work harder and take away your badge!” It’s an exploitative and unfair practice and nobody should be praising you for this. If, hypothetically, some fanatic e user put in 8 hours a day of work for a full year, would they receive the equivalent of *at least* a $50,000 salary? If you cannot guarantee this, you are absolutely going to be exploiting your community. The fact that they may be working on “what they want to work on” would not justify them making anything less, that’s merely a social engineering scam.
May I suggest this: If you need more resources, don’t exploit the open source community for cheap labour– pay real money and hire employees. You have a product, you are profiting off of this, so you have no excuse to be too cheap to hire. Furthermore, there are stakeholders (your customers) who want a stable product. Don’t gamble with their money. I for one am glad I haven’t yet purchased a license.
The whole point of the open company is to move away from just rewarding with (immaterial) recognition, as is currently the norm in open source and online communities, and instead give them the opportunity to get a real income from their contributions.
Will participants make enough for a full time living? There is no way to know in advance, but at least they should get a fair chance. Then it is up to their own effort if they succeed.
March 25th, 2009 at 1:53 am
Tristan, there’s a bug database at http://www.e-texteditor.com/bugtracker/ - I found the link through the forums.
There’s an example though. If it were already open, as in wiki-style open with anonymous edits, I’d have already added a link to it on the front page.
As to planning out the future, simple enter a few bugs regarding future milestones. Argue in each for the reasoning and required features. When blocking issues are discovered make a bug for them. A little of that and you’ve got your todo lists.
Remember though, to guide everything your way. Not by demanding everyone does what you want, but by doing the things you want in a way that lets others work with what you produce. But be prepared to do the things you think are good ideas, not wait for others to do them for you.
It’s interesting that the author’s name (even a pseudonym) isn’t more visible given that he’s talking about building a web of trust.
I don’t see how trust directly equates to benefit to the company, so I’m not sure how this rating system would work. If I’m trusted because of my flawless wiki edits how does this equate, compensation wise, to the author of the program who is similarly trusted but has actually written the software? Would I get a percentage of all profits, or only of the increased profits (if any) since my changes? Would people select their peers for reward based on liking them, trusting them, or thinking their work directly translates to profits?
I’ve always wondered about a reward system instead of patents - what if every year we pooled some money and rewarded the people who ideas had been the most helpful, to us.
It also seems that customers should be participants in the system. We automatically trust them a fair bit, because they’ve put their money where their mouths are, and their perceived value is a large part of the equation.
March 25th, 2009 at 2:23 am
For many years I ran a corporation called ViewTouch. This was also the name I used to describe the first graphical touchscreen point of sale software that I created back in 1985-86, the kind that is widely recognized as POS software today. About three years ago I began a transition from this corporation to a worldwide organization which is very, very much like what is described here. It was the right thing to do. I am very glad I did it. The organization has a zero cost of doing business so it can’t really ‘fail’. The balance sheet can’t begin to measure the organization’s assets and it doesn’t have any liabilities. It’s also very difficult for traditional companies to compete against this organization. Yes, it’s all about trust. That’s what makes it work. Well, that and the quality of the resources the organization shares and has available to it. So, yes, this idea can work and it does work, very well.
March 25th, 2009 at 3:08 am
I think that the task likeability must be taken into acount, if there’s something that’s needed to be done, but nobody want to do it, you have to give some kind of reward for doing it, and maybe doing it in a automatic way, but that has the problem of bounty chasers.
I hope you have a great success
March 25th, 2009 at 4:56 am
Trust metric is only a heuristic. Personal agendas will prevail unless there is loyalty and bonding.
Keeping focused is a team effort which requires a proper structure for guidance, resources and evaluation. This needs to be done daily and efficiently.
Maintaining the right manpower in the organisation and employing people with the right temperaments in suitable roles is essential…. …and they need to know how to work together.
How do I know? Because I wrote the book at http://vulpeculox.net/treems which goes into these things and much more.
March 25th, 2009 at 5:13 am
sweet!
this really ends with all the pre-made ideas about the course of life as it is…doing anything, everywhere, whenever…
please continue!
March 25th, 2009 at 5:28 am
Wauw, your idea sounds GREAT! Even if it does not work, your try will make the world better and more wise.
As an independent contractor (not softwaredevelopment, but implementing flow in our workstyle) I will be working on how to develop this idea into other branches and I will be following your work and enjoy it!
We are many “open space”-people (www.openspace.org), who have recognized large crowds of people doing amazing things together everybody following the law of two feet: If you are not learning or contributing, then use your two feet and go somewhere else.
Good luck to you and all of us!
March 25th, 2009 at 7:22 am
My background is that I have started and grown a company to sixty individuals. We are an open-source company, and have been profitable since founding.
I think this is a cool idea on a small scale. However, it won’t scale past 15-20 people IMHO. At this point the company is big enough that communication is stressed and you need to start hiring administrative staff. And depending on your customers you will need some serious financial savvy to satisfy auditors and gov’t regulations. At scale, it becomes very hard to rate each other across the company; hierarchies were developed (similar to a binary tree) in part to manage the flow of communication and avoid overwhelming the communication channels. However, you might then be able to rate amongst teams in the fashion you describe, and then use another mechanism to rate the teams against each other.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:03 am
I can see another potential “failure mode” of this system (if you can call it that). Suppose all goes well and over time, you end up with a small group of people that have all the skills to make your open company stable and profitable by effectively working full-time for it. They communicate a lot and thereby get to know each other as friends. The problem is: based on the observation that the profit is divided among participants, they may not be very open to newcomers, who would inevitably get their share. Newcomers would get low trust metrics and quit in no time unless the clique that runs your company decides that the newcomer really can contribute something unique that will drive up profits by a higher amount than the loss incurred of “hiring” another person. Even if the newcomer gets in, it probably would take a while before they get to participate in decision-making processes. Your open company is now effectively reduced to a classical closed company (with the only difference that within the company, the hierarchy is less formal).
March 25th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Awesome idea, I’m curious to how it’ll work out. What toolchain do I need to hack on e? GNU, Microsoft VS, …?
The windows version is build using MS Visual C++, on Linux it would be build with the standard GNU toolchain.
March 25th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Very nice idea.
I have been running a one person company for some time, and I have always given my clients the source code of what I make. More recently I have been experimenting and thinking of participating in open source projects and teaching on the net to generate revenues.
Your idea sounds very nice and should create many one person companies who can work on your product along with other things they do.
I wish you best of luck.
March 25th, 2009 at 10:27 am
Ken brings up a good point about the pathological social dynamics of the clique. We live in a world where people’s altruism is mixed with sometimes very conflicting motives. Whatever trust metric is developed will have to account for this. Think about the kind of dynamic that goes on in open contributor projects like Digg, Slashdot and Wikipedia, not to mention MMO’s. Over time the number of significant contributors is narrowed significantly and the cost of entry becomes pretty high. That’s not always bad, but it becomes self limiting in ways that might not benefit the company. New ideas, new blood, division of revenue streams, or just the idea of an outsider could play into the evalations in a way that is hard to defeat.
Put another way, communism looks good on paper, and it might work if it were implemented by sheep. But get humans involved and things fall apart as soon as some figure out a way to game the system and get something for nothing.
Mind you I’m not saying that this is an insurmountable problem, but your trust metric and everything that drives it, or is driven from it, had better account for bad human behavior, especially in cliques.
March 25th, 2009 at 11:49 am
One thing I can offer up from a Personal work experiance standpoint is this. Make sure that you read up on 1099 law as regards workers in other states (countries etc). I work in a payroll company now doing IT work and have come out of payroll (where I was for quite a few years). Administering the information from an accounting/payroll side of this I think will be rather hard, though I will say that I have done payroll for quite a few companies that had 1099 employees from almost every state and it CAN be done. I would also suggest, once this ball gets rolling, that you contact a payroll agency to outsource that aspect of your business to. I think with the lean “executive” aspect of this undertaking, you may want to have one less concern, and I know, with the product suites available, that you can pay a very reasonable rate (especially in this economy) and have a full suite of HR services that will protect your undertaking from any missteps with the payroll/taxation side of this venture. Most of those companies will also handle most-all of your EMPLOYER taxation issues (940/941/945s, 1099s/1096, fed,state unemployment forms et. al)
If anyone with your company needs any more information about any of that type of stuff, feel free to e-mail me at the address I provided the site, and I’d be happy to offer what advice I can.
From a tech standpoint, I’ll have to take time out in the evenings to check what it is exactly that is needed and see if I can contribute in that way. I’ve been a windows kid most of my life, and haven’t touched c++ in awhile….
March 25th, 2009 at 1:44 pm
Sounds great, but I foresee scaling issues. Say it works and you get lots of people signed on, making meaningful (but individually small) contributions, trusting and rating each other, playing nice and generally being happy and productive. Then you get the the end of the month/quarter and divide the sales by the (now quite large) number of stakeholders (filtered by trust-metric) and everyone ends up with ~$1.85 each. What then? If you’re going to make hundreds of slices, you need a very large pie, otherwise people are going to be very underwhelmed with their portion.
If you’re dividing up the cash based on social capital (trust metrics) then what about hours worked? For this to appear to be fair compensation, then I would imagine that people need to feel that there’s a tangible link between effort and reward. If people feel that more charismatic community members are being unfairly rewarded at their expense, or worse gaming the system, then acrimony may ensue. If you look at online communities who use trust metrics now, there’s a fair bit of this - along with a huge amount of gaming of the system - and it’s only imaginary ‘badges’ and other community ‘flair’ at stake - just image what lengths people will be willing to go to if it’s actual money.
Mixing business and pleasure is always difficult but I will endeavour to pitch in when the web based bits get opened up. Good luck!
March 25th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Jon Says:
March 25th, 2009 at 1:23 am
No offense, but I predict “fail”.
The questions raised about customer vs. developer values are extremely valid questions. “The freedom to decide what you want to work on” is not an efficient business strategy. Not only will you end up with features left unimplemented because nobody wants to put in the work, you will be left with popular features being reimplemented three or four times by multiple people all wanting to reap the rewards. Software projects need a command structure that defies the very freedom in the above quote. Working on what you want rivals the simple act of “getting stuff done”.
I wanted to cut and paste the above to refute this statement. You fail to see that not all people are willing participants in a project for simple monetary gain. I would think that your holding up of the open source community as something to be protected and not “abused” would make you realize that your statement is moot. I think people offer their talents and resources to an endeavor of this type for the simple reason that they enjoy what they have contributed, thus you have sooo much in the way of very complex FREE open sourced content available. The fact that this company is offering a way to do something you enjoy, AND make money from it, deflates the “concern” for manipulating and abusing people’s willingness to try and further a new idea, a new concept, and it’s nay sayers like yourself that merely contribute to the misguided vision that people are merely money-grubbing slaves to the almighty dollar. I for one, will contribute as much as I can to this project for the simple joy in being able to say I participated in something new and idealistic, and I am willing to wager that I will be one of many MANY people willing to follow suit.
IMHO I think your fear of abuse in regards to the open source mentality is un-founded and shines a light on the fact that people mis-understand things like ingenuity and integrity, and also speaks volumes to the moral slide we’ve all taken in thinking someone is consistantly trying to bilk us of our time and efforts. You may not think it’s a good/sane/competant idea, but I have a feeling you are in a minority that in the long run will be meaningless because you contributions are neither needed nor will be missed because so many others will gladly step up and offer what they can.
March 25th, 2009 at 8:26 pm
There’s a page in the wiki for ideas and suggestions.
http://e-texteditor.com/wiki/index.php/OpenCompany
I made an account for people to use, public/bugmen0t (note the zero), and put it up on Bugmenot. Hopefully by lowering the barrier to entry we can get people to post their concerns directly on the wiki and get involved.
I took a rough stab at describing a tentative compensation system and some pros and cons. Ideally we can get something like Wikipedia’s article on arguments for and against religion - an analysis of classes of compensation systems. “Peer judged vs User judged”, “Reward Profits vs Reward Effort”, etc, with pros and cons for each. Remember that whatever we decide is reasonable also needs to have the supporting arguments so that newcomers will understand it and work with us.
Some of what’s there needs to be spelled out by the founder. Access to the company credit card for instance
and the limits of a contractor’s power. The rest of it, by virtue of the open nature, is up for discussion. Get in there and add sections like ‘== Ethical Concerns ==’ or whatever interests you, and get involved.
I’m sure there are many places this could go, from a community of developers who get paid to hack on E after it’s officially EOLed, to a new type of company that starts new development projects and explores new opportunities.
March 26th, 2009 at 12:38 am
The idea of an open company has been on the back of my mind recently, and it is great to see a company restructure themselves to allow anyone to contribute to the work necessary for the company to succeed.
One important aspect (that others have alluded to) is that there needs to be customer interaction with the developers to appropriately rank the development and tasks that need to be accomplished. Given a database of customer data that can apply a dollar value (per license) of the feature, bug, or service they require would provide an effective way to encourage developers and other employees to tackle the tasks that are worth the most to the customers. In fact, desired release dates of these features could also be integrated with varying scale of pay to encourage tasks to be done sooner. And this method could work for all aspects of the organization.
March 26th, 2009 at 5:47 am
It’s funny, Jon predicts this will fail for financial problems, and Tristan thinks it’ll succeed despite financial concerns. I on the other hand think it’ll succeed because of financial reasons.
What is success? More users served, more developers enriched? The first is trivial. I only have to tell one person, or fix one bug and people are served. Developers enriched - that’s easy too. I can do this during my spare time, it doesn’t demand my attendance all day every day so it’s okay that it wouldn’t pay as well as a full-time job. If I made twenty bucks over a year of fixing software that I’d be using anyways it’d be a win. Especially counting the resume/advertising benefits of writing for successful open-source projects.
There’s definitely money and other benefits to be had here (or someplace like it), even if it is unconventional.
But I wouldn’t stick around if the benefits aren’t fairly (imnsho) distributed. I wouldn’t do volunteer work for Microsoft (forum support, writing bug reports) because they’d benefit far out of proportion to me and by nature aren’t willing to share.
It’s not that I wouldn’t help on forums without a “real” wage - it’s not like I directly profit from any of the time I spend on forums - it’s that if the work I do is adding value, I want a reasonably sized piece of it.
But if the company is open, including the financial details, I’ll have the ability to judge for myself and will simply stop helping if I don’t feel properly appreciated.
Yes, the value adding is the key. The main criteria for rating participants should be if they have expended the business to include themselves. This is also why we should not be afraid of ending op with a small clique, closed for new participants. If somebody can add value enough, they will always be welcome.
March 26th, 2009 at 11:58 am
If anyone is interested, there is also an E Text Editor Uservoice page here:
http://etexteditor.uservoice.com/
It’s much better than either the forum or the bug tracker for tracking feature requests (and perhaps bug). If you’re getting involved in E, this is definitely something to track. It’s unofficial at the moment but I’ve invited Alexander to become an admin (I didn’t get a response, but assumed he’s ok with it)
I am following it (and admin). So just keep posting your suggestions. Thanks to Charles for setting it up.
March 26th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
you might get a few repuglicans squawking about the “S” word
(socialism)
Maybe we will have to term it “Open Socialism” ??
But IMO, your absolutely right on.
This should be the way of the future,and very well may be the only way that works.
Well, to me it would actually seem to be almost the opposite of socialism. Instead of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” it would be “From each according to his needs, to each according to his ability”.
March 26th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Interesting in many ways.
Also, a lot of good arguments.
Personally, I hate the concept of voluntary ‘Open Source’ projects. I never work for free, why would anyone do that? Don’t they like to eat and pay the rent?
Nail down the amount of compensation, and I will be interested. Even if it is ’shares’ of worthless stock.
Management has to exist in any project that involves more than 2 people. You have to decide on goals, strategies, tactics. Then you publish tasks and let people assume responsibility for completing those tasks. So you need tools for collaboration, and some people need to be paid for their ability to steer the workforce in the correct directions.
Work this all out, and your biggest product will be the open-company environment. Oh yeah, you will be compensating us for contributions to that too, right?
March 27th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Hi,
What’s to stop people from
a ) Downloading the free portion of the code, removing all references to the core and releasing a far superior product that will outshine yours
b ) Gaining a high enough trust rating to have the core and distribute this.
Since the code is copyrighted, just remaking it to your own product and trying to sell it would be illegal (and might be harder than you would think).
Outright piracy is impossible to stop anyways (a good cracker can always find a way to break the binary).
March 27th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
This is an incredibly beautiful idea! Some might consider it hard to succeed, but weren’t the successful great ideas of the past also considered impossible to succeed? I will be following you on this. I am interested in seeing this idea grow. Best of luck and success!
March 28th, 2009 at 11:41 am
this should be an interesting experiemnt
I hope it goes well
the hard part, as always, will be making a reasonable income!
Tony
March 29th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
Bravo! I’m always glad to see a courageous businessperson taking a risk to try to make the workplace better for all of us. I wish you the best possible success and riches for everyone involved.
I will have to investigate trust metrics more. It seems like it is an attempt to give structure to an unstructured problem, which is sometimes hard and sometimes impossible. The aspect of being able to “game” the trust metrics is most concerning to me. It seems similar to building anti-virus programs or the Digg.com algorithms. You will have to keep changing the game each time someone comes up with a new tactic. That may add overhead. I know that you feel that it will be possible to build a trust metric that is impervious to gaming, but I don’t think that will work. Gödel proved that any computable axiomatic system cannot be both consistent and complete. To me, that says that no software application can every be beyond gaming by human beings.
But enough of the criticisms. I truly do hope you find a way to make this work. And I immensely appreciate the guts you have to even try. It is people like you that make all progress possible.
If it works, we’ll have to name it after you!
March 30th, 2009 at 6:44 am
It’s a great idea. I’m waiting to see how will evolve.
I’m only wonder what this will mean for further releases: how often should we wait for a new version, how many bugs to be fixed, what/when new features will be added, and so on.
It is not like e is just being handed over to the community. I am still, and will for the foreseeable future continue to be, the main developer. So e will still be fully supported and under continuous development by me. Everything the community does will be extra, and will hopefully allow e to evolve much faster, and maybe free me up to work on some more innovative features.
March 30th, 2009 at 9:56 am
For some guidance, you may want to have a look at Federman, M. (2006). The penguinist discourse: A critical application of open source software project management to organization development. Organization Development Journal, 24(2), 89-100.
This was published a couple of years before Valence Theory work got really serious, and the understanding of what makes an organization that’s consistent with the ubiquitously connected and pervasively proximate world in which we live (i.e. the UCaPP organization).
Yes, what you’re trying to accomplish is actually being researched in the academy, and there are several examples, to greater or lesser extents, of what you’re trying to accomplish. I would suggest to you that your idea of a quantitative Trust Metric will not work in the long run, since, when you’re dealing with people and complexity, positivist methods are typically not very effective. It ultimately turns into a form of concertive control that has effect opposite to what it is you’re trying to accomplish. You may want to check my blog link (and the Valence Theory label) for some ideas that might help you.
Good luck with this. You are on the vanguard of what’s coming for all of us.
March 30th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
This is fantastic news. I’ll be watching this with much interest as I’ve long wanted to fix a few bugs which I reckon are probably not too tough but which really frustrate me as a user.
I hope this really _can_ work, but remain a little skeptical as to how keeping a core of the development closed source is going to stop piracy. I guess it depends what it is that’s kept that way. Any clues on that? Any clues as to where to look for more information on how we can contribute? There seems to be a lot of sources of romours, but very little hard evidence of one place to look…
Good luck!
Jon
Keep your eye on this blog and the forum.
March 30th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Wow, this is truly exciting! I really can’t wait to see what comes of this over the next couple months!
April 4th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
This thread was forwarded to me by one of my employees.
This concept reminds me of a recent article I read in Inc Magazine regarding a company called Threadless. In the article, the author describes how these two guys created a community first, and then got their employees, vendors, creative design, and ideas all from within the community - blending/blurring the lines between customer, partner, vendor and employee.
They made $30MM in Rev last year, and the article claimed around $8-$10MM in profits (not gross margins, net). Now they’re teaching Harvard School MBAs exactly what you’ve envisioned here. I would recommend getting a copy of this article somehow and reading it at least twice, it may really help ya.
Wow, through a quick search, I found it - check it out here: http://tinyurl.com/inc-threadless
(no I don’t work for Inc).
April 6th, 2009 at 3:09 am
This is an interesting concept, I’m curious to see how your approach goes.
What you are in effect doing is leaving a small binary blob in the code, that’s nothing new to the OSS community. However, this blob has a unique function, it makes sure you pay for using the software (modified or not).
I’m not going to go into a moral or idealistic rant. I’ll just wish you luck and closely watch to see how things go. Its obvious that you have determined that you won’t make enough by just selling support for the software, yet have heard your users when they say they want the source code to make custom modifications.
Well .. somebody was bound to try this .. again, very interesting.