"Do you Floss?"

Lawrence Lessig's review of Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source and Eric von Hippel’s Democratising Innovation in The London Review of Books. (Vol. 27 No. 16 dated 18 August 2005, subscription required to read online.)

"Both books address similar questions: how come these (user supplied innovation) economies actually function? How do we understand them? How could we improve them? And both make it clear that we all – citizens, businesses and governments – lose if we ignore the wealth these economies create.......

"The core of Weber’s analysis.......addresses two fundamental questions: first, what motivates those who contribute to this sharing economy? And, second, given the complexity of large software projects, how are their contributions successfully combined?......

"Most developers, Weber observes, code (free, libre, open source software) FLOSS projects to fix a problem they are themselves experiencing.......A programmer at a major bank, for example, might have discovered a problem with the way a program handles many simultaneous users. That programmer then ‘opens the hood’ (to borrow again from Raymond) to investigate the problem. If the coder fixes it, he has served his own private need – either for himself, or for the company he works for. That service needs no explanation from the perspective of the (quid pro quo) qpq economy. The puzzle is, why does he then release his fix to others for free? Why, after expending private resources, would he not demand further compensation first?

"The answer has something to do with the individuals concerned, and something to do with the nature of software. It’s ordinarily hard to understand why anyone would give away something of value, but that’s because usually, giving it away means having less yourself. But software in particular, and knowledge in general, is not like food: when I reveal to you how best to install Word on your computer, I don’t lose that ability myself.......Weber points to some familiar reasons – the kudos, for example, that flows to a programmer from others in his community – but he adds another that is often missed. It’s not just that code is non-rival; it’s that code in particular, and (at least some) knowledge in general, is, as Weber calls it, ‘anti-rival’. I am not only not harmed when you share an anti-rival good: I benefit..........

"The real difficulty with FLOSS economies, however, is to understand the way contributions are co-ordinated. For not only are the contributors spread across the world, the project to which they are contributing is insanely complex........Weber’s answer is that a combination of norms and technology replaces the ability to issue commands........The norms are many, and familiar: they concern who leads a project, how decisions get made, ‘technical rationality’ (meaning practical results decide), and transparency in decisions. Most interesting is a commitment to the freedom to ‘fork’, meaning to split a project if its current leader pushes it in a way that many don’t like. This keeps alive the possibility of ‘no-fault divorce’ in all FLOSS projects.........The less familiar, but perhaps more important tools enabling co-ordination are technological: the design principles that enable code to be developed by many different people at minimal cost. Because extensive co-ordination in FLOSS is difficult, developers build projects, for example, to a disciplined modular design. So long as the interface of a module plugs into the rest, no one need worry about how the internals work........

"The software development that Weber describes is alien to most of us. But von Hippel naturalises it, showing us that aliens are everywhere. Something very much like FLOSS is happening in a wide range of commercial contexts. Sharing economies, in other words, are not just for geeks......Von Hippel writes:

The ‘private investment model’ of innovation assumes that innovation will be supported by private investment if and as innovators can make attractive profits from doing so. In this model, any free revealing or uncompensated ‘spillover’ of proprietary knowledge developed by private investment will reduce the innovator’s profits. It is therefore assumed that innovators will strive to avoid spillovers of innovation-related information. From this perspective . . . free revealing is a major surprise: it seems to make no sense that innovators would intentionally give away information for free that they had invested money to develop.

In the areas that von Hippel considers, between 10 and 40 per cent of users adapt the products they use, and freely reveal their innovations.........Why do they do it? Von Hippel identifies a number of motives. As with FLOSS, the innovator may benefit personally from the diffusion of an innovation because it increases the value of the product (anti-rivalness). The clearest example is academic publication, where ‘free revealing’ (publishing in open access journals) increases the number of citations the academic receives. And as with FLOSS, the innovators may benefit simply because they value the process of innovation. The hobbyist tinkering with his mountain bike may well be producing something of value to himself, to other cyclists and to the company that makes the bike. But he wouldn’t therefore call his tinkering ‘work’, at least in the qpq sense of that term."