Not Invented Here
By Greg on Jan 27, 2007 in Business, Open Source, Random Thoughts
Anyone who’s been around the tech industry for any length of time knows what these three words, and their acronym, NIH, mean. To summarize, NIH refers to the organizational malady one observes in many project leaders and others in positions of control who frown upon, and frequently seek to crush, all ideas, projects and products not initiated by them. Often, if you want your idea adopted by someone with a severe case of NIH, you have to essentially make it their idea – you basically let the NIHer “steal” the idea. Yeah – you know what I’m talking about, ‘cuz just like me, you’ve done it – played doormat for the greater good, because it was more important to you to get the idea adopted than to get the credit.
As technologists (as undoubtedly you are if you’re reading this blog) let us pose this question: Where does NIH come from? What causes people to become so singularly and doggedly focused on promoting their own pet projects and agendas that they will subjugate the greater good - however measured - to their own selfish interests? I submit for your consideration (and hopefully debate) that NIH stems from, and is part and parcel of, the culture of secrecy that pervades so many technology companies.
Give the Gift of Good Karma
I had the pleasure of participating recently in a conference call discussion on the topic of consumer experience with several leading thinkers from the Open Source, New Media and Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMORPG) communities, the purpose of which was to begin a conversation around how and why community-driven, or at least community-inclusive, products and projects seem to deliver superior results. The President of MMORPG company eGenesis offered an interesting thought about how communities’ basic ground rules – like secrecy or openness - influence culture and behavior. He described his recent experience at burning man, and specifically its gift economy, where strangers give strangers gifts, and how this fostered a very welcoming and relaxed atmosphere. This experience led him to conduct a thought experiment: what if, rather than a gift economy, this gathering were based instead on a theft economy, where the ground rules were, if you succeed in stealing other people’s stuff without getting caught, you get to keep the loot. This would lead, he postulated (and I agree) to an environment of secrecy, suspicion, hoarding and deceit. OK - so you’d be forgiven if right now you’re asking yourself “what the hell does this have to do with systems management?” bear with me.
Stop and think for a second about the lengths to which most large software companies go to try to prevent their code from being copied and their license terms from being breached. And consider further the sheer amount of collective money and energy that these companies and their customers spend on lawyers and lawsuits, auditors and audits, and compliance officers and compliance. I’d say that today’s proprietary software world is pretty darned close to the the anti-burning man theft economy dystopia envisioned by Andy.
If one were unlucky enough to be living in such a world, it’s logical to expect that NIH would be epidemic and acute. Because when you create a culture of secrecy and distrust, it is only natural for people to look out exclusively for their own narrow interests. Over time, those who steal and hoard well would get richer and more powerful, and most others would be scraping by at best. Think contemporary Rio - Think computer industry of the 1990s.
And when communities spawn a culture where NIH is rampant, and collaboration scarce, they produce inferior results. Think IE. Such communities produce inferior results because, over the short term, many good ideas never see the light of day, and over the medium to long term, because good people self select out of these environments.
Not Invented Here
Now consider the meaning of these three words in the context of Open Source. Perhaps better than any other three words I can think of, they convey the power and culture of Open Source. In this context, Not Invented Here means openness, inclusiveness, collaboration, debate, meritocracy – the best idea wins regardless of its source.
For producers and users (or prosumers to borrow a term from the book Wikinomics) of Open Source, Not Invented Here means faster product innovation through user and solution provider code contributions; Not Invented Here means greater utility for Open Source users because the product is, at least in part, invented by them; and Not Invented Here means lower R&D, sales and marketing costs for the Open Source company, which translate into lower acquisition and ownership costs for their customers. In Open Source, Not Invented Here is a beautiful thing.
To summarize, ground rules determine culture, culture determines behavior and behavior determines outcomes. Openness leads to collaboration and trust, collaboration and trust lead to meritocracy and meritocracy leads to better results. In contrast, secrecy and being closed leads to NIH and hoarding, NIH and hoarding lead to autocracy or oligarchy, and to inferior results.
I live with my family in Raleigh, North Carolina (a seemingly random fact, the relevance of which will become apparent in a sec). My wife teaches ballet to children, and so she’s always good for a couple funny kid stories each week to lighten me up. One day, she brought home a particularly funny, and as it turns out, very relevant story. At the start of each class when she takes roll, she likes to ask her kids a question to get them engaged. One day she asked what their parents do for a living, to which one little girl replied “My daddy works at Red Hat – they saved the computer business.” When my wife first told me this, I thought it was an absolute riot, and I also thought it was more than a little presumptuous of that little girl’s daddy. The more time I spend around Open Source, though, the more I think her daddy was right.
Sphere: Related Content
Receive
Blog Updates via Email
Rayne Van-Dunem | Jan 27, 2007 | Reply
I see the rationale behind NIH in proprietary software.
The company that produces a product wants to stake a single claim of innovation on it, that they were the first to come up with that implementation, and to let the world know that THIS - what you see in that product - is the look, feel, function, and concept that belongs only and exclusively to that company, and no one else. The brand is tied to that look, feel, function, and concept (hence, innovation), and the company would fight to Chapter 11 to keep it within closed doors.
This means that they will not share, play nice, or cooperate with their direct rivals. It’s their intellectual property, one which they have sacrificed millions of dollars to create, and they will not let their rivals have any share in that property without a commanding, governing stake in all decisions concerning that property (and that if the company says “we’re gonna jump”, the other competitors will respond “how high?”).
Every company in known existence has possessed this attitude, some more vigorously than others (Microsoft, Apple, Adobe). This leads to products which look like they were developed so as to look and work as different from their competitors as possible (just to say that “WE - not Apple - made this product”).
So NIH is good in that it forces companies to think for themselves (even out the box), and not follow arbitrary standards that seek to, eventually, shut them down.
Look at Microsoft: they couldn’t have UNIX or OS/2, so they made Windows; they couldn’t get Java, so they made .NET; they couldn’t get OpenGL, so they made DirectX; they couldn’t get JavaScript, so they made JScript; they couldn’t get Flash, PDF, or XUL, so they made WPF, XPS, and XAML.
It’s all about how you can get around legalistic obstacles and come out on top of all the others, a kind of software Jujitsu. And Microsoft had mastered that art quite well.
BTW, have you noticed that, despite Ballmer’s diddy about Linux having MS’s intellectual property, Microsoft, in its history as a company, has rarely ever been the plaintiff in a case against another company? Usually, it’s getting sued by every other company or government for some freakishly-huge matter of historical proportions, but, AFAIK, Microsoft has only sued a few companies like Linspire (then known as Lindows) and Google over trivial cases, like how “Lindows” looked way too familiar to “Windows” or how Kai Fu Lee allegedly violated his contract with MS to work for Google.
Maybe it doesn’t like the courts all that much.
Greg Wallace | Jan 28, 2007 | Reply
It’s an interesting point. I agree that the proprietary nature of IP can, and has in many instances, stimulated innovation, as you point out with Windows, etc. This is not unique to IT, either. In biotech, too, there are frequently great races between teams of researchers at rival companies to find the gene that cause this, that or the other desease.
The quesion in my mind is does this regime, where companies invest massively in essentially duplicate activities in order to get an advantage, lead to greater innovation than a more cooperative approach? And, relatedly, what is the impact on other stakeholders, like customers and participants in the downstream supply chain, like resellers in IT? It is interesting to note that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stipulated in their AIDS research grant that the results of all research must be openly shared with everyone. Doesn’t this fly in the face of your argument? (see: http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/display.article?id=7860)
Greg
Rayne Van-Dunem | Jan 30, 2007 | Reply
Touche….but almost.
I think the reason why the Foundation has that policy towards research results is because they see that research in the same way that the FSF sees software: as a service to be given.
Meanwhile, Microsoft sees software in the same way that those rival companies see the results of their AIDS research: as a product to be sold.
This means that Case A will see any withholding of the innards and documentation of those results as a needless detriment to those who may need such things the most: for the Foundation, the poorer countries which can’t afford paying royalties by the suitcaseload; for the FSF (correct me if I’m wrong), the poorer vendors which can’t afford paying similarly-exorbitant royalties (can’t imagine how much it would be for actually modifying the source code before redistributing it, though).
Case B, OTOH, will see those same withholdings as necessary for the livelihood, profitability and well-being of the maker and its employees: for Microsoft, the money from licenses which are raked in through the sell of every pre-installed Windows PC (+ Office, Visual Studio, etc.); for the research companies, the money from patents and royalties which is raked in through every new distribution deal in Brazil or South Africa.
Hence, there are different standards for either development:
When Case A does it, its called “evolutionary” (and “necessary” from the getgo).
When Case B does it, its called “revolutionary” (and “ahead of its time”, which means that adoption or adaptation by other parties won’t come until years down the road. For instance, Quartz came on Mac OS X years before Windows got Aero or Linux got Beryl).
When Case A does it, it takes longer for development, as it has to wait for other vendors to adopt the changes from the main tree (read: SVG).
When Case B does it, it usually takes a much shorter time, since it is more likely to make use of one exclusive platform, thus making it incompatible with other vendors by at least a few years (read: .NET vs. Mono).
So its all about which perspective from whence you look.
On the upside for FOSS, Case A, while longer in its full implementation, gets the wider degree of portability and longevity of usage.
Case B, however, has to be continually maintained or upgraded with something new and spiffy, on pain of that product becoming a monetary liability to the creator.
What would that mean, however, for the countries which should be able to obtain those free, no-royalty antiretrovirals in the future as a result of the mandates of the BMGF?
Greg | Feb 1, 2007 | Reply
well put - I think I agree with most of what you say. I have proposed to my colleagues here that iPhone would never have happened if Apple were an open source company, which I think goes to your “evolutionary” versus “revolutionary” construct. But would iPhone (and the Mac’s resurgences since OS X, and iTunes and iPod, …) ever have happened were it not for BSD?
Well, this is straying pretty far from the original blog about NIH, but it’s interesting nonetheless
openmoko | Feb 1, 2007 | Reply
what’s so great about the iPhone? Seems entirely locked down and even locked to a “cingle” provider?
For me openmoko is much more interesting than a 500$ iPhone. I’m kinda like Mark “dive into python” Pilgrim who used to be a big Apple fan, then …
Is there a version of python that’ll run on it ?
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/06/02/when-the-bough-breaks
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/01/12/sharecroppers
certainly osx is nice but I like my bsd raw