I am a great believer in judging the present through knowledge of the past. In the last 25 years or so, one of the biggest trends in business and technology has been what could be loosely called the open source revolution. the notion of being good business Sharing your source code is not yet established in the eyes of many traditionalists, however the idea of leveraging existing open source software is. We are rapidly reaching the point where almost all major non-niche software is, in one way or another, open. On every Android phone, every Mac computer, virtually every major web technology: servers, databases, browsers, compilers; all foundations are open.
This is in stark contrast to when I was writing my graduate dissertation “Open Source Software in the Enterprise Environment”, shortly after ESR wrote “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, when Microsoft and its gigantic closed source code base was the leader. indisputable and there were but one or two serious examples of open source software being used commercially.
Then why? What changed? Did people suddenly realize that, as Raymond said, the “bazaar” model was the right way to go? No. The introduction of ideas alone rarely makes a difference, and in any case, the notion of a distributed workforce, through individual interest working on a cohesive whole, isn’t exactly groundbreaking.
In fact, software development, as a process, was always perfect for decentralization: all that was missing was a ubiquitous communications infrastructure for developers, some way to seamlessly share code and work together easily. Not surprisingly, the rise of the Internet with CVS, IRC, Usenet, and mailing lists coincided with that of open source software.
So the previous “cathedral” model provided much more?
Actually yes. He facilitated a lot of business stuff that we might loosely consider “value plumbing”; First, it incentivized professionals: it paid developers for devoting their time and energy to a project. Second, it provided all the necessary supporting assets to allow development to take place (hardware, software, tools, educational material, etc.). Third, it acted as a sink for funds: it collected payments from those who benefited from the work done. In short, he took care of the cash flow, obtaining a good profit in exchange for enabling and incentivizing the production of solutions.
Initially assumed as important, it turned out to be less so; It turns out that people often work on software just for fun. However, we cannot deny that this “value plumbing” still plays an important role in human activity and service provision.
So what does this tell us about the future?
Companies, and in particular the service industry, have, until now, followed a ‘cathedral’ approach to the commissioning, provision and management of services that would fall under this ‘value plumbing’. We might recognize it by tight coordination, forced coherence, explicit top-down management, centralization, and rigidity. The fact that we have single legal entities with authority and responsibility over large swaths of production is a very clear sign of this.
eBay, as an enabling platform, pioneered truly global decentralization; it functioned as a key enabler for small businesses and cottage industries throughout the developed world (not to mention a lucrative source of funds for some of the less scrupulous operators in internet-enabled parts of the developing world). With the Web 2.0 and mobile platform (which it is heavily entangled in), we see a new class of decentralized applications. The so-called “sharing economy” is beginning to take shape with Uber, AirBnB, and TaskRabbit being notable examples. Like eBay, these operators reduce the relevance of a whole class of “structural middlemen” and replace their “value plumbing” with a big tech-savvy matchmaker.
The high-level deconstruction they involve usually comes with an accidental degree of opening (Uber’s “safe driver fee”, AirBnB’s “cleaning fee” – it’s typical to know more about your matching service provider). So what do taxi companies, hotels, and teams of unskilled or semi-skilled labor have in common that made them key examples of “decentralized services”? Where do their profits come from that allows them to shrink down to a scalable automaton so easily?
They manage their reputation (through word of mouth, marketing, and advertising), manage their workforce (through financing, hiring, and deals), manage their market (through adapting to changing levels of supply, and demand) and manage their risks (verification, compensation, insurance and bonds).
Although they can’t seriously claim to have created truly new or open markets, they are getting close. In the world of open source software, they are a kind of shareware. It’s not entirely commercial, but it’s not really free either. There are still singular entities, matchmakers, behind the decentralized veneer, as is evident when you go to state, techno-social Germany and see that the only kind of Uber you can request is a regular government-licensed taxi.
So while they’re not quite there yet, these are the beginnings of a societal shift in expectations; as consumers we expect greater transparency in the operations of our provider (from knowing the name of our driver to the exact origin of the rubber of our shoes) and greater freedom in the choice of our service; As individuals, we expect a greater ability to sell our skills, time, possessions, or potential; As companies, we hope to lower the barriers to entry in any market in which we wish to compete. As with open source software, it won’t be long before legions of good-enough hobbyists (or professionals looking to go it alone) are competing, bazaar-style, on a level playing field with the cathedrals of the industry. .
And the idea of ”bazaar services” is the final conclusion of this social change. As open source software is pretty much a zero barrier to entry and fluid in terms of leadership and authority, we will be encountering the world of service delivery next. The concerns are the same as 20 years ago. The answers are similar.
Software writing was only the first thing to become fundamentally decentralized, and only because of the natural technological knowledge of its people and its nature of being completely data-driven. With Ethereum, crypto-law, Web 3.0, and the like, all aspects of services will follow the same route. The idea of a rigid organization or corporation will evaporate, leaving the very essence of human interaction patterns, policed only by openness and information-theoretical mathematics. Whereas once the “interaction pattern manager,” “value plumber”—or “corporation” for short–was subject to laws about the emergent behavior it was enabling, the strict legality of emergent behavior will become less and less relevant as it becomes drastically pluralistic and impossible to control without any entity, legal or otherwise, coordinating or benefiting from it.
We will begin to see a world without intermediaries, intermediaries, trusted authorities, where services are not only delivered, but also advertised, found, bundled, and secured, directly from the provider to the consumer. Patterns of interaction emerge and continue not through the clumsy, inefficient legal system and slow, rigid corporate rules, but through the inherently adaptive emergent effects of flexible, agile, and direct economic incentives. This is where we’re headed and if it’s delivered as well as open source software has, it surely won’t get there fast enough.
Can we benefit from this new social model? My opinion is a resounding yes; the gains will come, as always, from serving (perceived) human needs or from providing efficiency gains to those incentivized to recognize and deploy them. However, the types of models that are lucrative are not yet apparent. Don’t expect the for-profit entity to look like any now, or you’ll be stuck like those looking for the next Microsoft in the year 2000 and putting their money into VMLinux and RedHat. What we think are great differentiators now will become a commodity in 20 years, just like operating systems and browsers in ’95.
Understanding where these differentiators might be requires first understanding what will be commoditized. Food for thought: what if the “commodity” turns out to be a completely vendor-neutral, open, and trustless digital marketplace? Ubiquitous “value plumbing”, business logic constantly evolving but maintaining readiness for everyone, whoever they are, to be able to participate in… Bazaar Services.
4/5/2015 ADDENDUM: Having revisited category BI must apologize for my abuse of Raymond’s analogies; the original work was more about the distinction between traditional working practices (mostly commercial software, but included some OSS like GNU) and decentralized working practices (what we now tend to think of as open source software development), rather than strictly owner. /commercial vs. FLOSS. Even in circumspect terms, the notion of decentralization within software development is prevalent and correlated with open source development. Interestingly, even apart from OSS, one could argue that part of the Agile methodology (I’m thinking SCRUM) is joining this general trend toward self-organization, decentralization, and the authorityless operation of the Bazaar.
