Re: [ox-en] Steven Weber * The Success of Open Source
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2006 07:51:14 +0100
Hi Michel!
Last month (45 days ago) Michael Bouwens wrote:
This has been a wonderful resource for me,
:-)
BTW: Currently I'm reading Eric von Hippel's "Democratizing
Innovation". I'll also write a (shorter) review about this interesting
book which sheds some light on the Oekonux topics from another
perspective.
However, I was hoping that you would perhaps revisit the following points about chapter 3:
You say:
The chapter then describes a couple of variants of leadership
but you do not specify what is said, but this is really crucially interesting as well
You then continue and say:
The chapter continues with descriptions of a couple of decision-making
schemes found in Free Software projects
I am equally interested in this summary.
Of course, I should read the book myself <g>.
I already quoted very much and I had to leave out at least *some*
pages to raise some appetite for the whole book ;-) . It's certainly
worth reading.
Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de> wrote:
The chapter then describes a couple of variants of leadership. But it
concludes:
This kind of variance does not demonstrate that leadership is
irrelevant; instead it suggests that there are different ways to
lead and that a satisfying explanation of the open source process
needs to go beyond the question of leadership. [p.90f.]
The chapter continues with descriptions of a couple of decision-making
schemes found in Free Software projects. Similar to leadership it
concludes:
Each of these decision-making systems has strengths and weaknesses
as coordination mechanisms. [...] What they share is the fundamental
characteristic of the open source process - there is no authority to
enforce the roles and there is nothing to stop an individual
programmer or group of programmers from stepping outside the system.
On a whim, because of a fundamental technical disagreement, or
because of a personality conflict, anyone could take the Linux code
base or the Apache code base and create their own project around it,
with different decision rules and structures. Open source code and
the license schemes positively empower this option. To explain the
open source process is, in large part, to explain why that does not
happen very often and why it does when it does, as well as what that
I'll check whether I can give a short summary about the research data
presented there.
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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