The
Organizational Model for Open Source
July
7, 2003
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| A surprising entity has emerged to protect the
interests of open source software developers: the non-profit
foundation. HBS professor Siobhán O'Mahony discusses
this emerging organizational model. |
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July 7, 2003 Issue
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by Mallory Stark, Baker
Library
Programmers contribute to free software and open
source projects for many reasons—some for the fun of it, some to
improve their skills, others for a paycheck. Many people have wondered
why these people give their work away. The truth is that many projects
have incorporated in order to protect themselves from individual
liability. Since the Free Software Foundation was founded in 1985, a
number of new nonprofit foundations have formed, often around specific
technologies, to serve the interests of programmers.
HBS professor Siobhán O'Mahony discusses her
research on foundations formed around three projects: Debian, a
complete non-commercial distribution of Linux; the GNU Object Model
Environment (GNOME), which is a graphical user interface for
Linux-based operating systems; and Apache, a public domain open source
Web server.
Stark: Could
you explain why the emergence of nonprofit foundations in the hacker
culture appears to be a contradiction in terms?
O'Mahony: The hacker culture prizes autonomy
and self-determination. Eric Raymond defines hackers as those who love
programming for the sake of doing it, for the sake of obsessively
solving a problem. Thus, hackers who contribute to the open source
community are often intrinsically motivated.
It is important to realize, however, that hackers are
a diverse group. I have interviewed hobbyists, students, academics,
software professionals, and government workers who identify themselves
as hackers. It is not safe to generalize about all of the values that
hackers share, but they tend to agree on at least one thing: Respect
must be earned and cannot be derived from position.
| There are
three big
challenges that I identified. |
| —Siobhán O'Mahony |
Much of what is funny about Dilbert cartoons
is the disgust that technical workers have for managers who do not have
intimate knowledge of the content of their work. This emphasis on
demonstration of capabilities is even more critical in the open source
community. One earns the respect of peers by demonstrating skills and
making valuable contributions of code to a project.
Associated with these values is an embrace of
informality and distaste for "administrivia"—for this too can take away
from the pure joy of programming. So I suppose what can be considered
to be contradictory is that many community-managed open source projects
have incorporated and created nonprofit foundations with formal boards
and designated roles and responsibilities.
Now there is a wide range of foundations that are
emerging. At one end of the continuum are nonprofit foundations that
act as little more than legal shells to hold a project's assets and
allow it to collect donations. At the other end are nonprofit
foundations that have elaborate committee structures, manage releases,
and even hire employees.
Q: What were
the greatest challenges faced by the three nonprofit foundations you
studied?
A: There are three big challenges. One, which
is common to all start-ups, is resources. Many foundations have been
successful in garnering donations of hardware and equipment when
needed, but do not have vast reserves to support legal expenses,
travel, or conferences. However, since these foundations are primarily
electronically constituted and manifested in the physical world only by
a mailing address, their capital needs are minimal.
| People are
intimately aware of the fact that
too much structure will disenfranchise the very people who make the most successful
open source projects possible. |
| —Siobhán O'Mahony |
Second is the tension between embracing the informal
work norms and ethos of the hacker style of programming with the need
to be more predictable and coordinated in managing software releases.
Projects that are more closely coupled with commercial firms have
experienced direct pressure from firms to communicate better and do
more formal planning of what will be included in a release and when.
Several projects that have created foundations are experimenting with
this tension now—"How much structure can we impose on volunteers?"
People are intimately aware of the fact that too much structure will
disenfranchise the very people who make the most successful open source
projects possible.
Lastly, open source software foundations have been
thrilled to receive support from Fortune 500 firms in the software
industry. This support is attenuated by the fact that no
community-managed software project wants to be "taken over" or co-opted
by one firm. The biggest tension here is how to sustain pluralism. If
open source contributors only recognize each other based on individual
merit, to the exclusion of monitoring where those people of merit are
employed, then the pluralism necessary to maintain a community form
could be threatened.
One of the most important roles foundations can play
is to ensure that pluralism in the governance of these projects is
sustained.
Q: Will the
nonprofit foundation be an organizational model that will define future
software development?
A: I cannot see into the future, but I think
the first experiment is in play.
I see the Open Source Application Foundation (OSAF) as
an example of the next wave. Mitch Kapor, a successful venture
capitalist who founded Lotus Software, invested $5 million of his own
money into building a personal-information manager, Chandler. In his
own words, "The whole idea of founding a company to develop new
productivity software was a complete non-starter. No sane VC would or
should fund a venture to compete with the Microsoft monopoly."
Even though his project is in the early stages, over
33,000 people downloaded the very first release in its first two weeks
and OSAF has received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to further
their work for educational environments.
I doubt that nonprofit foundations will define the
future of software development, but all evidence would indicate that
they will continue to play an important role. Keep in mind that the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which defines the protocols of
the Internet, is a nonprofit professional society. What is different
from professional nonprofits or nonprofits focused on charitable causes
is that open source foundations produce software that is resold by
third parties on commercial markets.
| The more
fundamental question that firms and policy makers need to be thinking
about is just what type of good
is software? |
| —Siobhán O'Mahony |
Similar issues surface in the biotechnology world,
where university and market conceptions of the life sciences can become
intertwined. The more fundamental question that firms and policy makers
need to be thinking about is just what type of good is software? The
answer to this question may be shifting just as economic and social
life becomes dependent upon a common computing infrastructure. When a
successful entrepreneur with every possible advantage chooses to found
a nonprofit instead of a firm, because this is more likely to lead to
success, what can be inferred about the state of the software market?
Organizational theorists argue that nonprofit
foundations are created to protect goods too valuable and socially
desired to be left to the market, goods like education. If we are
granting special tax privileges to organizations to produce software,
we as a society are saying something about the nature of that good and
the nature of the markets that create it.
Q: What were
the biggest surprises that you encountered in this project?
A: The biggest surprise to me was the level of
involvement that firms engage in with community forms on software
development and standard setting in general. That is, forms that are
not government sponsored nor formally constituted by partnership,
alliance, or consortia agreements.
It is interesting to watch how individuals with
limited power and resources negotiate and collaborate with the largest
of corporations. Community may not be exactly the right word to
describe these forms, as the term denotes more consensus than reality
might dictate. I do think that we need to expand our definition and
construction of the types of corporate alliances that are possible and
productive to include collaboration with collectives that identify with
political or occupational norms and values. 
Related Stories in HBS
Working Knowledge:
Why Evolutionary Software Development Works
The Challenge of the Multi-site Nonprofit
The Simple Economics of Open Source
Nonprofits and the $100 Billion Opportunity
The Secret of How Microsoft Stays on Top
About Faculty in this
Article:
Siobhán O'Mahony is an
assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets
group at the Harvard Business School. She teaches MBA Foundations and
the first-year required course in negotiation.
Related HBS departments:
Negotiation,
Organizations and Markets
Books by:
Siobhán O'Mahony
|
The Organizational Model for Open Source
