Clay Shirky on why love makes open source communities work (video)
37signals.com
37signals.com
In the mid-to-late 1990s, work on Perl was funded by revenue from books, employers, and conferences. Apache by financial donations to an NPO.
In the 1990s, the "community value" of helping others by offering free support in on-line forums was promoted by industry as a way to gain reputation enough to get a job. It was promoted by some investors as a way for commercial efforts to gain users and obtain free labor without paying the full cost of support.
Clay claims that it was "something new" when Linus could post about the kernel in its earliest days and get a "global network of collaborators". That's a remarkable claim that ignores not only the entirety of the GNU project effort that preceded it but decades of (quite often commercially motivated) software sharing the preceded that.
Clay has confused a difference in the modality of economic collaboration that becomes possible when source code is shared, with "love".
On the topic of motivation he is also too glib. He asserts that Linus' collaborators asked for nothing other than the chance to come together and do something interesting. That it was suddenly possible to do big things for love.
He ignores that it took all of 23 months before the founding of VA Research (as evidence that commercial interest was already, by then, a major factor).
This kind of talk bothers me because it takes what I think of as a high value (love) and misrepresents it and misrepresents history. He encourages a vaseline-coated rose-colored rememberance of industry history. It's not a kind of talk that leaves credulous listeners more informed -- pretty much the opposite. And worse, it leaves them in that state feeling all warm and fuzzy that somehow this must be love.