...
This blog has no purpose
...
David Scott
dave@recoil.org
| March 2006 | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
RSS Feed
Subscribe to an RSS feed.
Affiliations
Other blogs
Except where otherwise noted, this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Sat, 18 Mar 2006
Open Source Software
The Economist is running an interesting article on Open Source Software in business
("
Open-source business - Open, but not as usual
") which is quite thought-provoking. Much of the content was pretty-much standard fare (although reported accurately AFAICT which is a bonus) including:
- the necessity for projects such as Wikipedia to be self-policing without disenfranchising potential contributors;
- the observation that many successful projects -- although at first glance they may appear to be quite anarchic -- actually have a rigid internal hierarchy and strong leaders (e.g. Linux)
- worries about the lack of innovation in the open-source world (where much current effort is expended making software which operates like someone else's existing commercial software)
However the most interesting bit was the mention of Ronald Coase, the economist who, in 1937, wrote the famous paper " The Nature of the Firm ". (Advance warning: I am not an Economist, so I apologise if I get this wrong and it offends you!)
He asked the question, "why are firms the size they are?". Before I read his paper I had never asked myself this simple question (shame on me!)
When a company has a particular job to do, it can either use the "internal market" (i.e. get a fellow employee to do it) or outsource it to another firm (or contractor). Since the external market is bigger than the internal one, there ought to be more competition and a better price should be available. Taken to the extreme (for maximum efficiency), every company should have a single employee and outsource every job (other than the ones done by the single employee). Of course, we observe something quite different.
What seems to happen is that a balance is struck between handling jobs internally and outsourcing, depending on the overheads. Outsourcing a job can be quite time-consuming and expensive because one must: locate a firm to do the work, negotiate a legal contract, wait for the job to be done and, if necessary, try to encourage the other party to stick to their end of the bargain. By contrast, an employee has already got a pretty watertight contract with their employer (complete with penalties in the event of job non-completion) and hence the overheads are lower.
When working on an Open Source project, the terms are explicit and relatively simple to understand. Most interesting projects are under a small number of well-known licenses ( GNU GPL , BSD , etc) and there is often a convention on what happens to the copyright (e.g. the FSF may demand it if you contribute to emacs or you may be encouraged to keep it yourself as a way of preventing any future hostile takeover and license change). So a contributor doesn't need to engage a lawyer before starting work. Additionally, communication (via the web, email, etc) is cheap, fast and plentiful. So the overheads associated with outsourcing a job in the Open Source world are very small, so Open Source companies may be smaller and potentially the whole market more efficient.
That link had never occurred to me before.
Working through the photo backlog (with the help of flickr)
The problem with having a nice digital camera is that you can produce vast quantities of raw images and video and not have the time to do anything with them. So I'm going to have to run through the backlog brielfly.
Some photos of James and Fiona's wedding last month (or thereabouts):
On our way back from there, we decided to visit the town of Bath. I'd not seen the Roman baths before... very impressive! Unlike "Verulamium" the (amusingly named) Roman town which was cannibalised to construct the cathedral at St. Albans, the baths at Bath managed to get hidden under some other miscellaneous rubble and are now remarkably intact (modulo the roof etc which fell down).
The ancient tunnels which take the water from the hot spring into the various chambers still do their job pretty well and (IIRC) people used to take baths here as late as the 1930s. The spring water tasted slightly peculiar though and although people thought it had regenerative properties (and some physicians prescribed up to 5 litres a day!) I think I'll stick with old-fashioned tapwater.
