Comments on: Network Effect vs Open Source

By: John Lynn

John Lynn — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:14:43 +0000

I’m most interested in the project you are working on. Keep it private or open source it. Doesn’t bother me either way since I’m sure you’ll do what’s in the best interest of the community. I’m just more interested in what you are releasing.

By: Dell Anderson

Dell Anderson — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:14:03 +0000

You know the ethical answer but perhaps are semi-blinded by a very normal sense of self interest and human desire for control a beautiful new idea or service. In favor of the benevolent dictator approach is the Linux Kernel example, against it and taken to the extreme, your logic is basically the same as the one which makes Microsoft a virtual monopoly: A monarchy is more “efficient” than a democracy (but efficient at providing what the dictator decides, not what the community wants).

The whole beauty of open source, is that it humanizes and empowers software developers by placing the financial value upon ongoing sweat equity and support of openly shared information & ideas, not on closely held proprietary ideas, concepts, and actual code valuable primarily for their artificial scarcity. The latter creates ‘gated communities’ where only a select few are invited to be ‘in the know’.

You were on the correct track when you pointed out the alternative: Open sourcing the code, then allowing networks of networks to form.

Even if you open source your code, if you provide the best implementation of your idea, in the fairest, most efficient, least expensive way, your reputation as a FOSS advocate will go a long way towards making your network software service the preeminent portal for users. If not, users will gravitate towards others who do it better, and the world benefits.

This would result in the same or superior end value to users, with the primary loss being YOUR control, which is why I made the statements I did in the first paragraph. That is the open source model as I understand it.

By: Louis Cornacchia

Louis Cornacchia — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 04:19:25 +0000

Very interesting post given our conversations about our SaaS and its multi-tenancy architecture a few months ago.

Further review of the field has failed to support your claims that equivalent technology exists in open source.

I find your argument about “private” software not being unethical to be more than a little soft. Private is not open source, regardless of who “runs” the executables. The key issue here is who owns the data – as you well know.

On the other hand, I do agree with previous comments you have made to me about the need for certain institutions – universities, large hospital systems, governments to have access to source code very compelling.

I would appreciate your thoughts on future pathways before I am completely overwhelmed by input from “open source” attorneys; so please email me when you have a moment.

By: ftrotter

ftrotter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:23:39 +0000

You are quite correct, the reason for not releasing it b/c of their monetization efforts. However, -I- am more concerned with the network effect… b/c that is what applies to my project…

By: ftrotter

ftrotter — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 06:18:27 +0000

Hard to argue that StackOverflow is a failure. I will update my post with links to some of the SO clones that I have found, but none of them come close to StackOverflows presence on the web.
The network effect has a temporal component, the fact that StackOverflow is ahead will probably mean that it will stay ahead forever, no matter the license of the underlying code. The design of SO is genius and once you get the “formula” right it is very easy to imitate as site like this.

Wikipedia has had great success, but its also in the context of something that naturally has collaborative gravity, an encyclopedia. I am not sure that all collaboration efforts can pull off a wiki software release and an content project at the same time.

You are right that SO has a narrow focus, but then that is part of its usefullness and initial draw. Technical questions are uniquely well suited to the model. They typically have exact answers that can be answered completely correctly. If you have a SO type site on parenting, for instance, it would be much more difficult to ensure that the best answers were always voted up. SO is very smart to apply its merit model in an area that it will obviously work in first!!

-FT

By: anthony

anthony — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 05:32:41 +0000

“You see if StackOverflow releases its code open source, then you could have hundreds of separate question-answering sites start, all of which would have have only trivial amounts of users on each site”

not quite. if so releases its code open source, they won’t be able to monetize it as StackExchange (http://stackexchange.com/).

By: Bob

Bob — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:20:56 +0000

If the service is simple, and useful, others will probably replicate it anyway:

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9mzjg/hey_reddit_checkout_my_agpl_stackoverflow_like/

Why not open source it and find other incentives for developers to contribute and grow the community.

By: Aaron S. Hawley

Aaron S. Hawley — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:45:25 +0000

Lots of contradictions here — beyond the ones you admit. Let me point out just a couple.

“It should be noted that StackOverflow actually already open sources the content that it produces, using a creative commons license for the questions and answers posted there. They also provide a data dump of the content, so that you can get it for programmatic use without bothering to screen scrape. So they really are making an open source contribution.”

Not all creative commons licenses are free (or even “open source”) and in particular the one they chose is not. So Stackoverflow’s monopoly is maintained not only by keeping their server side code private. Actually, I just looked and they switched to CC-Wiki this summer which I guess it is free and open source. Nevermind that.

Regardless, pleading “network effect” as a defense for keeping software proprietary seems unfounded given Wikipedia’s success and Stackoverflow’s failure. I haven’t found many signs that Stackoverflow actually exhibits a network effect. This isn’t just because the software is private. The topics it covers is narrow and I don’t think the “long tail” will ever kick in. The collaboration (read “competition”) model is overly individualistic (merit points) and therefore there is little cleanup or organization of past answers.