The Free Egg and Open Chicken Argument: Why There Is an Open Source Community. And Stuff In Between.

I stayed up all night, working on some Drupal stuff with the theme - regular visitors may notice a difference, they may not - but before I started working on some open source code, I read 'There Is No Open Source Community'. I thought about it, and almost wrote about it last night. I get what John Mark Walker is saying, I do. I just don't agree completely with him, which by the eye grabbing title shouldn't surprise anyone. Writing that there is no Open Source community on OnLamp is like running through cacti naked in a state of arousal (works for either gender).

But he has a point. We'll get there.

The Main Points

I'll give you the Walker Dosage in a little list here - you should probably read the article, but he writes about as voluminously as I do and quoting him too much might cause the server to think that I cloned myself. So here's why there is no community, in point form:

• There is an overemphasis on individuals involved in Open Source.
• '...taking the position that individuals have pushed open source forward leads to the conclusion that a core group of ideological "believers" is necessary for the continued success of open source software...'
• '...What if you learned that the recognized leaders of the open source movement were simply figureheads of a process already well under way?...
• ...It's The Internet, Stupid...

I agree with every single thing point here; the dots are there. But I am in a quandary - you see, if I agree with those points, then I have to disagree with the title of the article because ipso facto - there is an open source community by these points. It's just not what everyone has been calling it. Oddly enough, I wrote something along these lines in June of 2005 - 'Does 'community' still exist in open source? Yes. And No.' Yeah, I published it here on the Dark Side of the Internet where most people don't visit, but I did write it. There's a large difference between the two articles, and that difference also highlights the major difference in the the perspectives. I wrote from a community perspective, Walker didn't. And taken together, they make for an interesting mix - if your attention span can stand both articles.

The same issues can be found in ICT as well; perhaps they are related. I think that they are.

Perception of Community: Business Perspective versus Community Perspective

Businesses are interested in making profit. Not money. Profit. If the economy ran on chickens, each business would be trying to stockpile chickens. This is the nature of business. Everything that business does is about generating more chickens than losing chickens.

The community wants the eggs. Conventional wisdom might have you thinking this is reversed, but here's the thing: Businesses need the chickens so that they can sell the eggs. Not everyone wants a chicken in their yard. This is the infamous 'Chicken and Egg' problem, and I'll take Aristotle's perspective - an egg is potentially a chicken, but a chicken is not potentially an egg - therefore the chicken came first. There's no theory of evolution there. Some egg falling from the sky to create a chicken has omelette written all over it.

That's all it really is. It's really that simple. If you can trade in chickens and get eggs, then the whole thing works - thus the concept of money. But people don't eat money, and they don't run operating systems that require a coin slot in the keyboard. It's a good thing we don't use eggs, or we would have some messy keyboards.

But business is part of the community, because it is made up of people who want eggs. They get some chickens, and they trade them in for eggs. But it's not about the chickens, it's about the eggs.

What's the difference? Most people don't deal in chickens, businesses do. Some people speculate in chickens, perhaps purchase shares of companies that own chickens in the hope that the eggs will increase in value. Most businesses aren't too awfully interested in eggs except selling them to customers - and if they can't make them better, they will do their best to make them more attractive. This is called marketing. In this world, Easter is the new Christmas.

Things run smoothly, until - lo and behold - people start raising chickens at home, and sharing eggs with everyone. The Free Egg movement has begun, and the head honcho is flying around haranguing wherever the head honcho can harangue, saying that everyone has the right to own their own chicken, breed their own chicken, and if they so desire, fork their own chicken.

On the side, some geeks got togethere and strung some pieces of garden hose with cups on the ends, linked them together and called it ChickNet, which to date is run by CHICKANN. It allowed people to... share chickens easily.

But everyone could do that before. It was nothing new. People always had the potential to have their own chicken - what changed was the cost of keeping the chicken, because it became a community chicken. How did that happen? ChickNet! It allowed people to cooperatively raise a community chicken. A Cooperative:

A cooperative (also co-operative or co-op) is an association of persons who join together to carry on an economic activity of mutual benefit.

Of course, nobody really called the Free Egg movement a cooperative. They walked around the coop on that one many times, but they never actually called it a cooperative. They gave it religious attributions, wrote about pollinating flowers with their noses, and fortunately did not start handing out books and flyers at airports. They did get a bad reputation because they believed people should have the following four freedoms:

• The freedom to use the chicken, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the chicken was bred, and genetically adapt one to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the DNA code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the chicken, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the DNA code is a precondition for this.

So wait. Now it's the DNA of the chicken that's important?¹ Well, if you want to breed a chicken that lays eggs that you like... the DNA for the chicken is important. Or you could do it the old fashioned way, if you wish.²

What Chicknet did was allow the community to raise their own chicken so that they could get eggs. This didn't bode well for people who wanted to sell the eggs, and they didn't like this Free Egg thing too much, so... they created the Open Egg movement, so that they could continue to sell eggs - which is fine. It just opened the egg market up for fresh competition.

But it's still eggs. And some people thought, 'hey, if I make better eggs, people will buy eggs because people are really only interested in eggs'. And then they thought about it some more, and realized that they could get the community to help them design better chickens so that they could sell derivative chickens to businesses that wanted to sell eggs in their products. Aha! But a name change was in order, so they sat around and drank tequila and guava juice until they came up with a name. The name is... the Open Chicken movement.

Chickens and Eggs! Chickens and Eggs! Now you can turn this argument all around in your head, but the ending is that it's about what dish with eggs you want, or how you like your chicken. That's it. Some people like both - some people don't want the hassle of dealing with the chicken, so they outsource it to the... community. And why does the community work on the chicken? Because they usually want better eggs. And why do businesses want a better chicken? Better derivative chickens.

It all ends with the community, though. Without the community there is no market for derivative chickens, and no market for eggs. In a utopian world, the community wouldn't need the businesses, and the businesses wouldn't need the community. But they do need each other.

And then there are people in between, like myself, who now and then get irritated enough to make a better chicken so I can get better eggs, or sometimes a better chicken for derivative chickens so I can purchase more eggs.

Thus, the Open Chicken/Free Chicken Community exists. It just isn't what some people make it out to be. And so, here's an exercise in identifying a Open Chicken/Free Egg leader:

1. The person will not claim to be a leader, and may even deny it.
2. The person will have strong ties to the community; the second people start wondering what the person is doing then that person is not a leader. Perhaps a visionary, but not a leader.
3. They will not try selling chickens and eggs to the community that they are representing; they will not be marketers. If they are good at designing chickens/eggs, then they are genetic engineers, and maybe they are leaders in genetic engineering - but that makes them Genetic Engineering leaders, not a Open Chicken/Free Egg leader.
4. They will recognize that their tastes do not represent the community.
5. Other stuff that the community will toss in...

So, when it comes to Open Chicken/Free Egg leaders, there are distinctions between leaders and community. A leader is supposed to represent the community. Being a leader in only one aspect of the community does not make one a community leader, it makes one a leader of that aspect of the community.

So There Is A Community?

Yes, there is a community. They may not get together and roast hot dogs together, but they are there. They may get together and demonstrate their chickens, eggs or ways to prepare either - but the community exists. It just doesn't exist the way it did before people started cooperatively working on chickens and eggs. CHICKNET helped, of course, but even without CHICKNET, it could have happened - just slower, and more geographically segregated.

And here's the kicker - if people are discussing chickens alone and aren't discussing the eggs, then they've lost the whole point. People - the market - are interested in what they can do with the eggs.

I'm hungry, in case you didn't notice.

So there is an Open Source community, and if the people recognized as leaders by the business end of things aren't recognized as leaders by the community end of things, business and community will suffer. The middlemen usually make out pretty well in such scenarios, but instead of adding value they usually take away. I don't know that this is a problem right now, but it's something that both businesses and community need to keep an eye on.

¹There is, of course, the Free Pig Movement, but mixing Kermit and Miss Piggy in that way seems strange.

² We suggest working your way up from fruit flies.