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Open source and the Long Tail: An interview with Chris Anderson

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Recently I was fortunate to interview Chris Anderson, editor-in-Chief of Wired and the keynote speaker for the Open Source Think Tank, coming up on February 7-9, 2008, in Napa Valley, California. Given Chris' views, I think he's an ideal person to headline an event whose theme is "The Future of Commercial Open Source."

I spent some time talking with Chris to see how his theory applies to open source. His ideas pushed me to reexamine my own, as my thoughts on how the Long Tail would apply to open source turned out to be a bit naive....

Everyone has heard about Chris Anderson's article, book, and blog, The Long Tail. Anderson's theory - that there is big opportunity in lots of little markets - resonates in a world whose technology increasingly permits, encourages, and even requires that we move beyond mass market product development to cater to individual tastes.

How does open source play into the Long Tail?

Anybody writing software for anyone to consume for any reason. That's the Long Tail applied to open source. Open source is fundamentally a marketplace in which anyone can participate. It's a meritocracy. It's a more efficient way of discovering development talent, rather than the old model of hiring out of universities and such.

This has serious repercussions for an industry that is starved for talent. The distribution of participants is more dispersed in the online world. As a result, you get more new ideas, different approaches, talents, and energies that come from surprising places. These would not have been identified in past years. [I interjected that Ross Mason, founder of the Mule project and inhabitant of Malta, as a good example of this.]

Look at Google's Summer of Code. If you map its participants you find develpoers in far-flung places like Madagascar. Things like language, academic training, credentials, and such don't matter as much with open source, widening the talent pool. This should make for better code.

Taste, talent, and demand is much more diverse than traditional markets relfect. Traditional markets reflect traditional bottlenecks with distribution, not necessarily reality. The Long Tail economy gives us a broader distribution of demand; the open-source Long Tail economy gives us a broader distribution of development talent and, by extension, development projects.

Did open source inspire the long tail?

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