Open Companies? Not so fast

Interesting post on the E Text Editor blog about The Open Company.

For those who don’t know (I didn’t) E is a text editor for Windows which is positioned as giving you the power of Textmate (my text editor of choice and where I am typing this post). The blog post is about open source, open source software development, and building businesses on top of open source. It’s a long post and somewhat philosophical and I don’t agree with some of the premises (I don’t mind working in a company. I doubt I could be doing what I do now if I didn’t). However, there is a lot of food for thought. In the end the post comes down to this

How do we make this titillating promise become reality? How do we make it possible for individuals to freely work together, just working on what they personally find important, while still making a safe living?

One option that gets dismissed is the one person company. What the writer focuses on is the “open company”, one with no concept of employees or bosses, where anyone could join at any time and doing whatever they found interesting and for the time they found appropriate. Sounds a little bit like “bursty work“, doesn’t it? But how does one compensate them?

I am still trying to wrap my head around the concept. I love the idea of “bursty work”, but I also like the idea of a group of people running with a bursty idea in a more organized structure. So what does building an open company entail?

1. Open Source
2. Building the trust metric
3. Compensating participants

The key seems to be the Trust Metric, a system under which participants can rate each other. The metric algorithms and code are also going to be open sourced (which is very important). Apparently bits of the core code will be kept private (presumably this ensures a revenue stream).

All this is just a long-winded way of getting to the main question that came to my head when I read the post. Is the model feasible, in general and specifically in the life science space? Can one, for example, build a Schrodinger-style software suite (OK, maybe Open Eye is a better example) using the open company model? Is it possible for people to jump in, add experience with a particular expression technology, develop a particular piece of code, or marketing experience, essentially a continuous “bursty work” model. Sounds like a great idea, but experience has taught me that it’s also somewhat Utopian. In the end, to make something work over the long haul, you need a focused set of individuals thinking ahead and giving the effort some direction. That’s why the most successful open source projects always have a core group that drives the project. Recently I have seen companies with models that seem to be in the middle. A core set of people driving the venture (project, company, etc) and others coming in on an as needed basis, e.g. developers, marketing folk, legal. That model is sustainable at least for the early stages of a company; even for companies making drugs, or some other product. The purely open company? I reserve my right to be proved wrong about my skepticism.