Karim R. Lakhani’s Infrequent Musings

I am very pleased to announce that the fine folks at MIT Press (Bob Prior rocks as an editor!) have now made a “free” version of my coedited volume Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software available online. All the articles are now available for download as PDF. Enjoy. This “best selling” book will be out in paperback as of March 2007. In the meantime I encourage you to buy a copy for yourself and one for everyone of your dear and close friends and relatives

Some of you may know that for the past 3 months I have been engaged in an academic job search. MIT Sloan in all its wisdom does not hire its own students and thus we are sent out into the academic wilds to forage for ourselves. Just as I was starting the interview process I came across this wisdom in a fortune cookie:

The taste of patience is bitter but the reward is sweet.

Well sweet it is! As of July 2006 - I will be moving up the river Charles and across to Boston. I am joining the Technology and Operations Management Unit of Harvard Business School as an assistant professor. I will be teaching the core Technology and Operations Management course to Harvard MBAs and continuing my research on distributed innovation systems.

Overall I applied to 7 schools and had 4 invitations for job interviews. The interview entailed about 8 to 10, 30 min meetings with faculty members and a 90 minute seminar on my research. The day of the job talk at the various schools ended up being quite intense. However I found the faculty at each of the schools (Wharton, HBS, NYU-IS, UC Berkeley SIMS) to be amazingly nice and very receptive to my research. The feedback in the seminars was also quite good and very constructive. In the end I was very glad to have a few options in front of me.

It feels great to be done! Phew!

On September 30 2005 I defended (and passed) my doctoral dissertation oral exams. It is such a great feeling to be done with much of the formal parts of my “higher” education. At the same time I have a feeling that this is just the beginning…..

Aga Shahid Ali’s wonderfull book of poetry Rooms Are Never Finished provides an apt title to my post and captures my view that scholarship is a journey.

See you here soon…

As some of you may know, I have been an active student and researcher of the Free/Open Source Software movements since 1998. Ever since I first encountered Linux, Apache and Perl in a bio-informatics lab at MIT - I have been intrigued by the “effortless” collaboration and cooperation behind the creation of open source products. Having seen the difficulties of product development inside of a large company - I was simply floored that such high quality products could be created in a community like setting. This combined with a course on user-based innovation by Eric von Hippel caused me to change my research direction and to foucs exclusively on models of distributed innovation as exemplified by the open source community. I can still clearly remember the day in July 1998 when Eric finally convinced me to drop bioinformatics in favour of studying open source. Many of my chums and colleagues shook their heads and said that I was chasing a fad. Well we now know better.

Most of my research has focussed on understanding the why and how of open source. Why it works the way it works and why it makes economic and organizational sense? So I was pleasantly surprised when Mitchell Baker from the Mozilla Foundation asked me to serve on an advisory committee to its Board to help determine the relationship between the Foundation and a new wholy owned, “taxable” subsidary. While Mozilla, its ancestors and its progeny have been well known for technical innovation. Very few have considered the social and organizational innovation done by the dedicated people working on the project. Keeping the Internet open for innovation has been their mantra and it can only be done if there is both good code AND good organzing ability. Starting with the landmark release of the source code from Netscape to the formation of Mozilla Foundation - the social innovations and adaptations to allow the evolution of a large scale code base to move from a proprietary company to a community have been remarkable. So the opportunity to participate in the discussion and advise around creating a new subsidary for the Foundation was a an opportunity that I just could not pass up, even though I have taken a vow of silence during my dissertation writing!

Here is why this so interesting from an organizational innovation perspective:
1) The technology world tends to be a battle between firms. Company “I” will go against Company “H”, Company “M” and Company “S” for technical and commercial supremacy. Firms know how to compete against one another. And certainly in the software world - Microsoft has shown repeatedly (1,2) how to defeat other competitors. But how does a company fight a community? Can it even do that? How does a company fight a not-for-profit foundation? Imagine Salvation Army Thrift Stores fighting and taking significant market share from Walmart. Imagine your friendly neighborhood Opera comany taking global market share away from Disney. It simply does not happen at any level of significance. However, the open source model has shown that community-based effort can and do win against commerical competitors. Even more interesting communities can cause commercial companies to make significant changes in strategy (E.g.: IBM and Sun embracing open source) based on their technical and market performance. That is why the new Mozilla Corporation is going to be such an interesting animal in the corporate jungle. On the one hand it will be a software development house - but on the other hand - its purpose is to promote innovation and openess on the internet by advancing the goals of its parent. I can just imagine the head scratching and shaking going on inside of companies trying to make sense of how to compete. The Foundation will no longer have to rely on charity for accomplishing its mission. Instead it now has the ability to generate significant resources and to actively promote its mission. Very cool!

2) The Foundation will now face a very new challenge of both running a company and also working with the community and an eco-system of value added developers. I have mapped out below the complex ecology. It is a non-trivial task but something that if done right will create a brand new model for organizing open source projects from a community perspective.

I firmly believe that this is not or should ever become something like a MySQL or JBoss type endeavour. Instead this a corporation with a public benefit misssion. Not a corporation with a profit mission. Profits matter a lot and will enable the corporation to serve its goals - but it is not the reason for its existence. It has to compete head on with Microsoft and Opera - but it cannot do it at the expense of promoting openness and innovation on the Internet. Running the corporation will not be any easy task but a an experiment well worth doing.

Finally I think this move has significant implications for social movements that care about changing the world at large. Most social movements are based on protest and boycotts. The means of fighting back against corporate and governmental institutions have always been to apply popular pressure on them. Open source communities have shown, that instead of protest, a focus on building alternative viable solutions can have much lasting and permanent impact. Building solutions that direclty compete in the marketplace puts pressure on firms in a way that boycotts and demonstration never can. Imagine if the living wage campaign, instead of just boycotting Nike, had formed an alternative company, lets call it Mikey!, producing hip athletic shoes and clothing made by fairly paid developing country workers. Imagine if they had created their own catchy slogans and gained significant market share against Nike. Imagine if the environmental movement had funded and created viable alternative sources of energy instead of merely protesting greenhouse gasses and nuclear power. Imagine the creation of GreenCar corporation manufacturing and selling hydrogen powered cars or ConSolar/Wind selling solar and wind generated electricity. Few social movements move beyond the repertoire of protest, disruption, violence, boycotts and show of solidarity in large numbers to the creation of whole, sustainable, alternative solutions in agreement with their concerns and grievances. This move by Mozilla Foundation is a further step in the right direction of social responsibility, profitability and community purpose.

I am sure I will blog more about this…but for now I am going back to my dissertation writing.

At long last! A book I have been co-editing on open source has come out:

All of you need to buy a few copies for your selves, your families and your friends! Oh yeah don’t forget your co-workers!

Ok now back to my vow of silence as I try to slay the beasts of dissertatia!

Ok folks dissertation has now taken over my life. Eric gave me a very aggressive deadline - so I have now uninstalled my RSS reader and have sworn of any writing that does not relate to me getting this piece of work finished!

Meanwhile you can see what I will be staring at for the next few weeks ……. see that pile of papers - CITATIONS!!!

I was so pleased to note that over the past weekend CalTech out hacked MIT - in our own backyards. Go here for details on the various hacks.

My favourite pictures:
Caltechers taking over Lobby 7…..

…..and building 7 by refering to us as the “Other Institute”

….and the response from MIT:

This reminds me of the fun days at MAC when there was great friendly rivalrly between the various engineering schools in Canada. I remember going to an engineering students’ conference at Queens and painting the fireball near the purple monstrosities of Queens Engineers.

A ton of fun!

BTW - Currently its Caltech - 7 and MIT -1 –> I do hope you guys from Caltech know what you have started!

Arthur von Hippel, MIT professor, 105
By Derek Rose, Globe Correspondent, 1/4/2004
Arthur R. von Hippel, a pioneer in the field of material science who founded the Laboratory for Insulation Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died Wednesday of complications of the flu. He was 105.

While at MIT during World War II, Mr. von Hippel’s laboratory made critical contributions to the development of radar, according to his son Eric von Hippel of Cambridge. He received the certificate of merit from the US president in 1948, according to his son.

After World War II, Mr. von Hippel became a leader in the relatively new field of the study of materials. His laboratory produced about 60 doctoral graduates.

In recognition of his contributions, the Materials Research Society established the Von Hippel Award as its highest honor in 1976.

Born in Rostock, Germany, in 1898, Mr. von Hippel studied physics and then joined a physics institute headed by Nobel Prize laureate James Franck. In 1930 Mr. von Hippel married Franck’s daughter, Dagmar. In 1933, after Hitler came to power, Mr. von Hippel left Germany. He worked at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and was recruited for the faculty of MIT.

Mr. von Hippel’s outspokenness and defense of the underdog made him beloved by his students but not always within the engineering establishment, according to another son, Frank of Princeton, N.J. According to an MIT website account, when Mr. von Hippel was notified of his election to the National Academy of Engineering in 1977, he said, “It appears that my friends have outlived my enemies.”

As a child, Eric Von Hippel, a professor of innovation at MIT, used to accompany his father to work. “I used to run around corridors, sticking my head in other offices and labs to see what they were doing,” Eric said. When Eric told his father he wanted to be a firefighter, Mr. von Hippel brought him to MIT to see what they knew about firefighting.

“He taught us how to be professors by bringing us down there to learn more about the things we were interested in,” Eric said.

He also said his father’s students were loyal to him because of the way he taught.

“They thought he was so cool. Instead of a formal exam he would invite them in for a chat, with apple pie, ice cream, and tea — and at the end he would give them a grade,” he said.

Mr. von Hippel lived in Weston for the last 65 years of his life.

In addition to his sons Eric and Frank, Mr. von Hippel leaves two other sons, Peter of Eugene, Ore., and Arndt of Anchorage; a daughter, Maianna of Needham; 11 grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.

Funeral services will be private. A public memorial service will be held at MIT at a later date.

Happy New Year All!

I just updated my website. Take a look and let me know if I should be add/change or delete anything.

If you are affiliated with the Tute — you can now blog for free. Go here to get your own. Also consider learning more about it during IAP

Every day, while I am desperately avoiding work or the library, I see tram loads of tourists visiting MIT and stopping in front of this monstrosity by the Sloan School.

This is a piece of art by Picasso. I am sure gullible tourists are made to “oooh” “aaahh”" “eeeehhh” and sometimes Y over this not so impressive piece of concrete. I don’t know what possessed MIT to accept this piece of art May be its all about the name. But to me it looks mighty ugly. Maybe the BigP was just fooling one day and decided to mix it up with some cement. Do I really need to say his blunders every day?

And do the poor tourists have to see it every day too?

Time for some more procrastination. Generals are fast approaching but I am too busy writing this blog!

Any way I was busy wasting time reading the local MIT rag. When I came across this interesting fact. There is an apple tree on campus which is a direct descendent of the same tree that sent an apple hurtling down Newton’s head and thus the invention of gravity.

For more on trees see here at MIT see here .

Here is a picture of the Newton tree at Cambridge University in UK. I promise to get a picture of its MIT cousin soon. Right after the generals. Now back to studies.