Open Sourcing

Software industry is clearly where the evolutionary approach of open sourcing has made a significant inroad into the conventional territories of proprietary development, with hugh and increasing success. A trend starting as epitomized by Linux, it now reaches beyond the arena of servers' operating systems and touches perhaps every business application with a critical mass of requirements imaginable in the commercial world. It doesn't stop there, and there is no reason why it should. Consumers are beginning to benefit from the fruits of open sourcing without being aware of it.

Evidence: most of the gadgetry applications on Facebook are developed by third parties; the walls between social networking sites are apparently coming down for easy transfer of applications; even Steve Jobs allows the code for the open sourcing community to develop applications for the new generation of iPhone; oh yes, Mozilla Firefox.

There is perhaps no better and more convincing proof to the merit of tapping into the collective wisdom than the success of open sourcing in the economies. If only the same approach can be applied more in the corporate world, problem-solving will arguably be more effective. But it is obvious that the hierarchical approach in decision-making still reigns in most companies big and small, at best complemented with the steering committee of cross-functional mix. Collective wisdom, however, seems not readily come from small circles, but have to be aggregated from the critical mass. In the organization setting, therefore, it means the broad base of workforce - the front-line troops in service delivery or the shopfloor proletarians in labour-intensive production.

Some companies no doubt do a better job in touching base with the workforce better than the others, via survey or focus groups or whatever you call it. For those who are serious at it, on-line social forum is clearly efficacious. For those who drag their feet or simply pay lip service, perhaps the subconcious fear of outdated Marxism still grips.