Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing by Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman

Author:Po Bronson & Ashley Merryman
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Business & Economics / Personal Success, Business & Economics / Motivational, Social Science / Anthropolgy - Cultural, Psychology / Social Psychology
ISBN: 9781455515165
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2013-02-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Michelangelo Had an Agent

1

In 1991, college student Linus Torvalds was participating in an online e-mail group, and he posted some related queries. A few months later, he let the group know that he’d written some source code, and he invited people to poke around it, send him ideas for improving it as they wished.

The ideas began pouring in. And they have never stopped.

The code eventually became known as Linux. Since its creation more than 20 years ago, Linux, now with 15,000,000 lines of code, has become the world’s most ubiquitous operating system, powering Android phones, eight out of ten financial trades, and the likes of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Twitter.

The promise of open source innovation is that you reach far beyond your team for ideas—beyond the walls of your company to the community at large. By harvesting tiny bits of ideas from thousands of different altruistic contributors, the result is something far beyond anything that one person could ever have imagined, let alone created.

The way the open source story is told, collaboration is the secret to creative innovation. Competition—between teams, between companies, and between people—is so last century. “Collaboration is the New Revolution,” announced the editors of the Guardian, the British newspaper. “The key to solving any problem is collaboration, not competition,” opined USA Today. Supposedly gone from the creative process are concepts such as property and authorship: nobody owns the jointly created project, and nobody gets to take credit, but everyone can benefit from the result.

But is this characterization accurate?

One of the amusing things about Linux is that because it’s open source, all the LISTSERV e-mails are online. We can read the flurry of e-mails—such as in 2007, when one developer got angry that his code wasn’t chosen to be included. Another coder’s design was preferred. Eventually, Linus Torvalds himself defended the process:

Does this mean that there will be tension and rivalry? Hell yes. But that’s kind of the point. Life is a game, and if you aren’t in it to win, what the heck are you still doing here?

We don’t want to play politics. But encouraging people’s competitive feelings? Oh, yes.

A research team at the University of Toulouse studied the Linux development process and concluded that it was a “winner-take-all game.” Hackers, disseminated around the world, work on the same part of code, and there’s a single winner at the end of the race. They don’t collaborate; they compete—on speed and utility. And as with any other competition, sometimes the losers gripe. Only one person, in the end, can claim to have solved the problem.

The Linux development method might be a grand collaboration, but any one programmer is not collaborating. He is writing code, alone, hoping to beat other programmers.

Claiming credit is a huge deal in the Linux community. About 13,000 people submitted e-mails to the Linux LISTSERV between 1995 and 2000, but only 350 of them were eventually credited as Linux contributors.

Here’s Torvalds again:

One of the most motivating things there *is* in open source is “personal pride.

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