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.
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