Linux and FOSS Are Not Selfish

Having read the original interview and Carla's take on it, I have to agree with Caitlyn again. Linus has a habit of making sensational statements, but aptly qualifying them by explanation. I think he acquitted himself perfectly well with this latest one.

All FOSS users and developers have personal motive for their actions. I'm a Linux and LinuxMCE user. LinuxMCE scratches my itch for a home automation and integration solution (didn't at first, as the developers tend to be a "hard" bunch,... hardcore coders, head down, RTFM types,... & don't dare disagree with their vision). My goal there is a home that senses my presence, knows what to do when I get home, helps me organize my (and my family's) life (lives), and integrates communication and scheduling and navigation, and also provides the home entertainment. My itch is best scratched by the project, and my interest and future contribution can help shape it toward my vision of what I want (And don't lie,... YOU want it too, you might deny it though). So, Linus's explanation is fitting with the reality.

Linus designed a framework when he started the Linux kernel project. It's flexible, scalable, and can be bent towards the users' and developers' wills... It satisfied their selfishness by giving them their framework, and was altruistic in that it forced them to give back (due to the GPL 2 license). Linux can give everyone a little something. I often thought about M$ with regard to this... They wasted an opportunity to use Linux as their kernel, but build their own proprietary services on top. Instead, they reinvented the wheel (and badly, I might add). If they had built Windows on top of Linux, like Apple built on BSD, they could have contributed and profited at the same time. Essentially, what Linus has described is Game Theory... Linux functions according to Game Theory's principles, M$ acts contrary and everyone loses.

Quoting:Each contributor has thier own set of interests (i.e. being "selfish"). Sharing the result of those interests benefit all of Linux. I think what Linus was eluding to was there is no central mission, but all of the contributions have built something usable and sustainable.

Indeed.

It is also possible that the original poster of this LXer Feature piece never delved further past "Eric Raymond's famous itch scratch concept" in CatB to reach the elaboration of this "selfishness".

ESR elaborates upon this type of "selfishness" specifically within the CatB section The Social Context of Open-Source Software:

Quoting:Earlier I referred to the ``Delphi effect'' as a possible explanation for Linus's Law. But more powerful analogies to adaptive systems in biology and economics also irresistably suggest themselves. The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the ``principle of understanding''.

The ``utility function'' Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation ``altruistic'', but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized ``egoboo'' (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one's reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity.

Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin's ``principle of shared understanding''. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied.

We may view Linus's method as a way to create an efficient market in ``egoboo''—to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he.

Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by (to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality, and depth of Linux documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much documentation? Evidently Linux's free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers.

Perhaps the type of "selfishness" elaborated upon here has already successfully and will continue to successfully "work with FOSS" regardless of the leanings of the original poster of this LXer Feature piece.