Date: Tue, 6 Feb 2001 01:39:42 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in (Rahul Siddharthan) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org (j mckitrick), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: quote about open source Message-ID: <200102060139.SAA06828@usr08.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <20010203131159.G94275@lpt.ens.fr> from "Rahul Siddharthan" at Feb 03, 2001 01:11:59 PM
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> > Open Source projects frequently discuss the evolution of their > > project; innovation really requires revolution, not evolution, > > for it to be innovation. > > > > Most innovation does not come out of the processes of large > > projects or companies, Open Source or commercial, academic or > > professional, research or project developement. It comes out > > of small groups, usually with 6 or fewer members, and usually > > driven by a goal that has been defined in advance. The small > > amount of innovation which doesn't fit this mold is accidental, > > serendipitous. > > I disagree with that. A truly revolutionary idea is always > "accidental, serendipitous". Of course, it seems to happen more > to some people than to others; that's a characteristic of their > personalities, that they don't think along conventional lines. As an example, Linux, 386BSD, and Apache all have their roots in very small, highly connected groups. At the early stages, these were revolutionary ideas, and they have collected much lint from their beginnings. Soft Updates came out of Ganger and Patt's leap-frogging of the USL patented Delayed Ordered Writes approach -- by quite a margin. Open Source is not really revolutionary. The valuation model is not really sustainable. Even now, we are seeing the formation of the immune response, and it's been gaining momentum. One only has to take a look at some of the needlessly complex RFC's being put out there for nominally "open" standards to see how companies are combatting being marginalized by the free stuff. Good enough is the enemy of better. If you want to trace it back, probably one of the turning points was the increase in complexity of the LDAP protocol. It was clearly an attempt by Netscape to control the playing field by controlling the minimum complexity needed to be implemented in order to play in that space. Microsoft and Sun have taken that ball and run with it, to the detriment of the industry. Some of the new "standards" are so complex that it's questionable whether a traditional Open Source approach could even field an entry. I'm rather convinced that the OpenLDAP project would not have been able to do a v3 implementation, except that it has a small, focussed team. It certainly would have failed, were it the size of a FreeBSD or a Linux. > But you cannot decide to have a revolutionary idea, and you > can't set up a small group of 6 people and tell them to have > a revolutionary idea. Either it comes or it doesn't. It may > well come when you're looking for something quite different. One or two people generally have the idea; either it occurs to one person, or it arises out of direct interaction between two or more actors. But an idea is a seed, not a revolution in the offing. To grow the seed into a revolution, requires gardners. > What your group of 6 people may do is develop a new and better > compression scheme, natural language processing system, whatever. > But that's evolution, not revolution. In hardware matters (new > kinds of storage media, new processes for fabricating chips, etc) > such advances seem to come from much larger, and very well > funded, groups. That's incrementalism. You really need to read "The Innovator's Dilemma". Large, successful companies, by their very nature, are not capable of making counter-intuitive leaps. The company structure is, in fact, rewarded for risk reduction, to the extent that it actually penalizes innovation. When disks went from 14 inches to 8 inches to 5 1/4 to 3.5 to 2.8... at each stage, the previous players were, without fail, marginalized or even went out of business. > Can you name any "revolutionary" ideas that actually came out of > small groups which were set up to look for revolutionary ideas, > or from individuals who planned to look for such ideas anyway? Lockheed skunk-works. Xerox PARC. IBM Almaden. MIT Media Lab. Martin-Marietta. Boeing. The Manhattan Project. The Chicago atomic pile. History is rife with small teams that have launched huge revolutions; some have even been very reluctant (e.g. Kepler and Brahe hated each other; Brahe actually died from a burst bladder because he refused to use the bathroom in Kepler's house). I seem to remember a couple of gentlemen who wrote under a shared penname of "Publius" ...The Federalist Papers. 8-). Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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