The world of open source software (OSS) has a long and well established history. In the 1960s, IBM originally sold their hardware with software included, code and all. This changed in the 70's and software became a proprietary product with restrictions on use and distribution². 

 

In protest, Richard Stallman resigned from MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab to develop GNU, declaring in his 1985 manifesto that: 
 

"I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement".

 

These noble sentiments are echoed in the Open Source Initiative's homepage which describes Open Source as a "development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in"³.

 

And against all odds, and the might of companies like Microsoft, we now have widely used and respected products like Linux, Firefox, Mediawiki and Open Office along with a plethora of developers who stand proudly under the open source banner.

 

Within the open source world are two schools of thought on how to develop OSS projects, articulated by Eric Steven Raymond in his 1997 paper 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar'¹. He looks at the success of Linux and narrates how that particular model worked well for his Fetchmail project.

 

Raymond argues that the bazaar model can work, citing Linux, his own project and providing anecdotal evidence of how he converted from building cathedrals to bazaars. He makes 19 observations in his essay:

 

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.

 

2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

 

3. “Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.”

 

4.  If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

 

5.  When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

 

6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

 

7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

 

8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

 

9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

 

10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they’re your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

 

11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

 

12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

 

13. “Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.

 

14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

 

15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible—and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!

 

16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

 

17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.

 

18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you. 

 

19. Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

 

So given that, under the right conditions, a bazaar style approach to open software development can, has and is working, can we apply that model to other projects?

 

Moxy believes so. We are looking at modelling complex problems, such as how Australia will transition to a low carbon economy by 2050. Existing models looking at this issue have been published, but are mainly 'closed' - datasets, assumptions and scope are not provided, and therefore not conducive to open collaboration. Taking inspiration from the OSS movement, a prime example of the power of collective intelligence, we are using open source tools to build a collaborative modelling framework that will be open to industry, government and the general public. By engaging a large audience, invested in finding solutions to sustainability issues, we believe that, to adapt Raymond's quote, "Given enough eyeballs, all [problems] are shallow".

Sources:
 

1. Raymond, Eric Steven. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Version 3.0, 2000. http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/

 

2. Muffatto, Moreno. Open Source: a Multidisciplinary Approach. Volume 10. London, UK: Imperial College Press, 2006. Available through Google Books 

3. Homepage. Open Source Initiative. http://www.opensource.org/