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Innovation Happens Elsewhere - open source as a business strategy

Posted on May 8, 2007
Filed Under Netcentric, Marketing, Opensource, Increasing Technology Adoption, Reading List |

I really don’t know where these entries about open source and insurgency are going to go. Most of the time, I doubt if I’ll have a well formulated beginning middle or end to any of this content. If you’re not patient, don’t read this.

Thinking about Brave New War, I grabbed a copy of Innovation Happens Elsewhere from my shelf and looked for the secret of why open source works. I guess it is not a secret because right on page 60 they tell you…

Open source works when a group of people all embrace a shared set of goals and establish a community based on mutual trust. All three factors - enough interested people, shared goals and trust - are required; if any one is missing, the project will fail.

Open source in people working on things for the public good in the commons. In software, the commons is the source code. The business model around the commons, then, must support the code. The free market tells us that businesses will be created in the halo of the code.

Over at Global Guerillas, Robb reprints an article from Defense News about the IED Marketplace in Iraq. He compares IED production with self-organizing open-source software networks.

Small, highly skilled IED cells often operate as a package and hire themselves out to the more well-known insurgent groups, such as Amman Al Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq or the Sunni group Ansaar al Sunna. They advertise their skills on the Internet and are temporarily contracted on a per-job basis, but otherwise remain autonomous.

It appears that reputation and trust and marketing have as much impact in the IED world as they do in the software world. In fact, flipping back through Innovation Happens Elsewhere, there is a section titled: why do they do it? Why does anyone produce open source software? To summarize:

• need for the product
• Enjoyment, fun and desire to create and improve
• Reputation and status
• Affiliation
• Identity
• Values and ideology
• Training, learning, reputation
• Hope of making things better
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