Business
What Business Can Learn from Open Source
paulgraham.com
Business
18 min read → 70 sec
Open source and blogging suggest that people do better work on projects they care about, in flexible environments, with ideas rising from the bottom. The essay argues these forces weaken traditional offices, hierarchy, and employment.
Open source and blogging reveal three forces reshaping business
Passion beats pay, offices hinder work, bottom-up beats top-down
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People working for love often outperform paid professionals
Firefox beat Internet Explorer on product quality
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Open source prevented Microsoft from extending its monopoly to servers
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52%
of companies replacing Windows servers with Linux
Forrester survey
5 / 20
Google, Yahoo, and Amazon make Windows servers harder to justify as a serious default
6 / 20
The Web made free work more powerful by lowering the cost of audience reach and collaboration
7 / 20
Twentieth-century professionalism looked superior partly because narrow channels filtered who could publish
Distribution bottlenecks hid how many amateurs could do the work
8 / 20
Average online quality is irrelevant because readers choose the best writing, not the average blog
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The standard office environment reduces productivity, while informal home and startup spaces often improve it
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Fixed office hours exist mainly because many companies cannot measure actual productivity
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Facetime encourages pretend work. Meetings and email consume slack and fragment useful work time
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A meeting-free Work Day would expose how much useful work employees can do without interruption
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Bottom-up systems can generate ideas and quality control better than managerial channels or hierarchy
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Open source and blogging use Darwinian quality control. Good work spreads and bad work gets ignored
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Aggregators like Google News, Slashdot, and Delicious outperform front pages by surfacing interesting articles
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Open source review improves reliability because anyone can find mistakes, unlike closed publishing or software
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The investor-founder relationship aligns autonomy and incentives better than the paternalistic employer-employee model
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Business will adapt through selection. Firms that ignore these forces are more likely to die
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