There's something about this "it's all in the open" mindset that I struggle with -- perhaps it's because so much of hacker culture is built around knowing something somebody else doesn't? But you're right: you can tell how sick an organization is by how poorly it shares inconvenient and embarrassing information among its members.
It's been my experience that some people naturally collect and hoard information -- it's a form of currency to them. It's not a hacker thing, but it does seem more common among really smart folks. We are taught that information is valuable, that education is a necessity for success later in life, and, worst of all, that magic ideas account for most successful businesses. In movies and in literature, over and over again we're shown people who gain and keep advantage because of information they hold. In addition, large parts of the structure of human society over thousands of years has been based on the value of keeping and sharing information. These different factors accumulate.
It's funny how right he is. Reading all these articles thinking you're learning all sorts of great useful things when really they leave out the most important parts. Then you go about trying to implement the things you read and you're left scratching your head wondering why things didn't work out like how the blog post said it would. By the way, not sure if someone has ever said this before, the author could totally be a stand-in for Philip Seymour Hoffman.
This is a question that is rather close to my heart: I do run an ice cream factory (well, a small sorbet shop) and my tendency is toward complete openness about methods and ingredients. We in fact had the Ben and Jerry's flavor research team stop by a couple months ago, and happily gave them a multi-hour kitchen tour. I don't think there were any questions we shied away from.
It's certainly a debatable business practices, and makes some of my partners uncomfortable. I think that we stand much more to gain from establishing open communication than we have to lose. Ben and Jerry's has a lot of knowledge, but very different constraints than we do. I'm not worried that they will steal our techniques of juicing pomegranates by hand, and while they were intrigued by our one-quart-at-a-time production, it's far from obvious how it would scale to their needs. We by contrast can learn a lot about their packaging, marketing, and distribution.
It may just be that I'm not a great business person. I'm much more excited by making something wonderful available to the world, and resent having to use price discrimination to make it possible to do so. We have started charging for kitchen tours to the public ($45), and while we've met some wonderful Google engineers, it makes me sad to think of all the people excluded because of the cost.[1] I'd prefer a world where people build upon others' successes to ever increasing heights, rather than one where everyone constantly reinvents the same trade-secret protected wheel.
In response to Dan's comment below, perhaps we run in different circles, but I have not found that smart people hoard information. Rather, the smartest people I know tend to be unable to stop talking about whatever they are currently working on, where they are currently stuck, and when they last had a breakthrough. But maybe this is just self-selection: if the truly smart ones don't talk, I guess I'd never know it.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 25.4 ms ] threadI've always thought that open source was deeply entwined in hacker culture. But perhaps you're referring to something else?
It's been my experience that some people naturally collect and hoard information -- it's a form of currency to them. It's not a hacker thing, but it does seem more common among really smart folks. We are taught that information is valuable, that education is a necessity for success later in life, and, worst of all, that magic ideas account for most successful businesses. In movies and in literature, over and over again we're shown people who gain and keep advantage because of information they hold. In addition, large parts of the structure of human society over thousands of years has been based on the value of keeping and sharing information. These different factors accumulate.
It's certainly a debatable business practices, and makes some of my partners uncomfortable. I think that we stand much more to gain from establishing open communication than we have to lose. Ben and Jerry's has a lot of knowledge, but very different constraints than we do. I'm not worried that they will steal our techniques of juicing pomegranates by hand, and while they were intrigued by our one-quart-at-a-time production, it's far from obvious how it would scale to their needs. We by contrast can learn a lot about their packaging, marketing, and distribution.
It may just be that I'm not a great business person. I'm much more excited by making something wonderful available to the world, and resent having to use price discrimination to make it possible to do so. We have started charging for kitchen tours to the public ($45), and while we've met some wonderful Google engineers, it makes me sad to think of all the people excluded because of the cost.[1] I'd prefer a world where people build upon others' successes to ever increasing heights, rather than one where everyone constantly reinvents the same trade-secret protected wheel.
In response to Dan's comment below, perhaps we run in different circles, but I have not found that smart people hoard information. Rather, the smartest people I know tend to be unable to stop talking about whatever they are currently working on, where they are currently stuck, and when they last had a breakthrough. But maybe this is just self-selection: if the truly smart ones don't talk, I guess I'd never know it.
[1] If anyone in the Bay Area is interested in a $5 shorter version of our kitchen tour, we're running one this weekend: http://www.meetup.com/SanFranciscoFoodies/events/45091172/?a...