Producing Open Source Software

Foreword

The most well-known organizational models of getting things done—whether it’s building a house, producing a motion picture, or writing software—tend to concern the prediction of and commitment to specific outcomes, mitigating risk to the plan, and correcting surprises along the way. In such models, innovation is seen to happen at the moment of inspiration of the idea—and the remaining 99% of the effort is perspiration, to paraphrase Edison. Say it along with me: “Yeah, right.” This view looks at innovation as a very solitary sport; we want to talk about Steve Jobs as the guy behind the iPod, rather than the mix of good engineers and product marketing types who collaborated with Steve to find the right sweet-spot combination of features and fashion.

We also want to talk about Linus Torvalds as the guy responsible for Linux, but that’s even less close to the truth than the Jobs/iPod example. Linus’ brilliance is not in creating an unprecedented technology innovation, nor in plotting the perfect road map for the Linux kernel, nor in having a full-time staff of his own to assign work to. The brilliance inside Linus is his ability to orchestrate the aggregated interests of thousands of other developers, all individually scratching their own itch (or that of their employer), and thereby making a product renowned for reliability, performance, and the features people need. Linus’ role is like that of an air traffic controller—watching the skies fill with ideas, prototypes based ...