Through out the rest of the open-source software community, the pace of innovation is increasing as the community as a whole fine-tunes a structured process used to facilitate that innovation.

Some of the theory that supports the design of this structured process comes from a 1997 essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” by Eric Raymond. Raymond argues against an overt hierarchy, and instead suggests that under the right circumstances, top-notch work product in the form of superbly written code can be produced by "a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches." In other words, independent, self-motivated hackers and companies can collectively produce innovative software.

He focuses on making things modular; building software like so many bits of Lego that can easily be pieced together.

Software is certainly not the only realm where this modular approach is useful. Other successful examples exist, including container shipping, out-sourcing of production and warehousing. In the financial derivatives world this is occurring in several ways. Fund managers can now out-source their mid and back office to firms like GlobleOp and their reporting to firms likes CorrectNet. It is interesting that banks are finally starting to realize that they can buy financial derivatives trading software from firms like Calypso, where as in the past, many tried to build these systems in-house.

Raymond also talks about a dynamic environment. And that is exactly what has developed.

What makes newest open-source community projects so successful is that the structure for sharing information is very well defined. If you want to start a new open-source software project, follow these steps:

1. Announce your project at - freshmeat.net
2. Post the projects source code at - sourceforge.net
   Sourceforge provides a framework for sharing the code, working together, and, very importantly, publicly displaying the contributions each hacker makes to the code
3. Set up a project home page – 72seconds.com (ok, that’s my blog, but you get the idea)
4. If you make news within the open-source community, it will be on –newsforge.com

Open-source Technology Group (a division of VA Software) runs the FreshMeat, SourceForge and NewsForge sites. Depending on the technology, there is a wide range of associations, such as World the Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Open-source Development Lab (OSDL), The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Feedback is provided from end users and fellow hackers.

Thus, in the open-source software community, innovation occurs through a structured process. However, it is important to note that while the process is well defined, the roles that people play are hardly defined at all. Open-source software is built in a truly emergent environment. The community that evolves around a new software solution is comprised of independent, self-motivated individuals. The hackers randomly bump into each other on SourceForge or find out about projects through FreshMeat or NewsForge. They get involved, contribute via SourceForge and via email. The hackers are motivated purely by their personal interests. They work on projects they like. Projects they think are cool. Collectively, they produce predictable, and usually optimum results in the form of constantly evolving new software.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if the people in your organization went beyond their basic job description, and solved problems or produced innovate new products or approaches with the same motivation that the hackers dedicate to open-source software? This is exactly what is happening at Google when their engineers spend 20% of their time on their own projects.

In response, some might cynically say that open-source only works well for people developing operating systems. Linux is actually not the only successful open-source software project out there. In terms of their impact on the general-public, a web server called Apache and an email server called Sendmail are both at least as successful. Apache is the most widely used web server, powering close to 70% of the world wide web. Sendmail holds roughly 80% market share among mail transfer agents. That means that Sendmail is usually the tool that actually delivers your email.

There are other recent open source examples that are attracting a lot of attention in the Web 2.0 world. My personal favorites are the Ruby on Rails web application framework and theRadRails IDE.

Two elements are powering the success of these open-source projects. First, an emergent environment has been created, with motivated independent agents driving innovation. Second, there is a well designed, clearly thought out and highly structured platform that supports the innovation creators. Without this platform, open-source software would not be the force it is today.