Open Source and the ‘Not Invented Here’ Syndrome

While watching CNN last week, I suffered one of those brain spasms that leave you holding an idea you can neither rationally assess nor forget about. I still can’t assess the idea — and I’m about to ask you for help on that — but my attempts to do something with it did give me a deeper insight into the forces that made the Linux development process so successful.

The idea that started this has absolutely nothing to do with open source, Unix or management. I was watching a CNN report on casualties in Iraq when it occurred to me that scratch-and-lose lottery tickets could be used to address a critical intelligence issue.

Right now, American intelligence officers in places like Iraq and Afghanistan face a problem akin to spam e-mail. They get thousands of petty criminals and vindictive fools asking for money and favors in exchange for mostly useless or erroneous information, while the people they want to hear from — solid citizens with real knowledge, extended families, strong social ties and something of substance at stake in the outcome — are mostly silent.

Income Explanation

There is a key reason for this: A petty criminal who comes into a few dollars by selling information doesn’t expect to explain the income to anyone, and he views his action as placing only himself at risk of retribution.

An honest citizen, in contrast, cannot easily explain a windfall earned by selling out his former oppressors and must, therefore, either hide it from everyone or expose his family to the risk of violent retribution. As a result, the people an intelligence officer most wants to hear from act like bankers being asked for loans: They’ll only contribute if the final outcome is so clearly assured that their information is valueless.

My idea for fixing this is simple: Give away, with as much publicity as possible, a large number of small-denomination scratch-and-win lottery tickets and then use winning tickets of known denomination to reward informants.

Risk of Retribution

In Iraq, for example, US$25 million — the amount offered for information on Saddam’s whereabouts — would let military personnel give away 250,000 tickets per week for six months with odds of about 1:25, 1:100 and 1:1000 of winning a week’s, month’s or year’s average Iraqi wages while retaining one-fifth of the winning tickets for use as rewards.

Informants then could be given tickets of known denomination, scratch them in public, be widely seen talking to American officers as they pick up the cash, and have their entire families help them rejoice in their new wealth, with the risk of retribution decreasing in direct proportion to the extent to which a black market in tickets evolves.

I thought this was a great idea that would be easy to implement, inexpensive and probably infinitely more effective than offering multimillion-dollar rewards to people whose limits are measured in hundred-dollar bills. Unfortunately, I’m a Canadian with no access to the U.S. chain of command or political process and thus no obvious way to get it in front of people who could either tell me what’s wrong with it or take action.

The NIH Syndrome

I tried a few possibilities and got a quick lesson in “not invented here” syndrome at work. Organizations like the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), for example, have groups dedicated to deflecting well-meaning fools who want to proffer ideas for consideration, but they don’t have a mechanism for accepting outside ideas.

When you think about it, you realize that organizational imperatives mean there’s really no other way for them to behave and that the same forces must affect almost all larger organizations.

This column, for example, has a largely technical audience. Most of you might not be any more qualified than I am to determine whether creating a market in low-denomination scratch-and-lose tickets makes sense as a way of encouraging middle-class informants to come forward — though if you are, or know someone who is, please contact me. But it’s a certainty that many of you have ideas that could help companies like Sun or Red Hat win their particular wars — and no effective way to get them evaluated or acted on.

Cathedral and the Bazaar

With this in mind, I went back and reread Eric Raymond’s account, in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, of the early days of Linux.

What I discovered is that you can sensibly look at the process as he describes it and claim that what made the open-source process so insanely great was the almost complete absence of “not invented here” syndrome among its earliest and strongest backers — including both Linus Torvalds and Eric Raymond.

That’s a new thought, at least to me — and it suggests that the bursts of creativity coming out of conflicts such as those recently seen in the BSD development world are the best possible harbingers of future success. After all, almost all of the sides of the schism actively recruit new members and new ideas, using no stronger a criterion than that the ideas brought in fit their particular tent.

Paul Murphy, a LinuxInsider columnist, wrote and published The Unix Guide toDefenestration. Murphy is a 20-year veteran of the IT consultingindustry, specializing in Unix and Unix-related management issues. Readers may contact Murphy at [email protected].