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Linux news
2007 07 03
Linux Gets Around the "Ignorance of Crowds" Phenomenon
Why Homogeneous Thinking is Dangerous to Value Investors
One of my favorite aphorisms is, "When everybody is thinking the same, nobody is really thinking!" [...] Spier has the following link on his website, The Ignorance of Crowds. I think that those of us who try to develop investment talent at investment management firms can gain some valuable insights from this article. It describes the Linux phenomenon of an open source development model. This level of collaboration works because, [...] But diversity does not imply egalitarianism. The open source model - when it works effectively - is not as egalitarian or democratic as it is often made out to be. Linux has been successful not just because so many people have been involved, but because the crowd's work has been filtered through a central authority who holds supreme power as a synthesizer and decision maker. As the Linux project has grown, Torvalds has gathered a hierarchy of talented software programmers around him to help manage the crowd and its contributions. It's not a stretch to say that the Linux bureaucracy forms a cathedral that coordinates the work of the bazaar and molds it into a unified product.
http://s5h.net/u?z68ba