Re:Open source comparison is a sham (Score 1)

Your comment about "outsource in a novel way" made me realize that, from a business perspective, open sourcing *is* just a novel way of outsourcing -- getting people who aren't directly involved with the company active in some aspect that improves the company. It's a market transaction -- give me X, I'll give you Y -- rather than an internal one -- you do what I say because I give you a paycheck.

For open-source software, the X is "access to the source, with limited rights to reproduce the source and object code" and Y is "improvements to the source for no additional labor costs i.e. money." Here, it was "full access to all our expensively acquired mining data"in exchange for "a pre-determined amount of cash under particular restrictions". In both cases, there are also additional incentives external to the basic exchange e.g. prestige and improved marketability. That is, just as Linus Torvalds can get better jobs based on his known expertise with Linux, this winning 3-D company will have people coming to them.

One of the interesting things about open-source, of course, is that money doesn't normally change hands at all. Any direct incentives have to be in the use of the code/application. That wasn't the case with the mining company, of course, but then the "source" here -- data for the area around the mine -- can't be as useful an application's source code, except to the owner of the mine. You'd have to sweeten the pot in order to get anyone interested.

I think that this is a main difference -- again, from a business perspective -- between outsourcing and open-sourcing: Is the data I'm getting useful enough to me that I'll forgo additional compensation? On the one hand, this proves your point -- they are just outsourcing -- but on the other it suggests that the difference can be pretty thin.

One question I have is "How is this different from putting this project up for bid?" Someone else in the thread said that it would have been easier just to pay consultants $500K to tell them where the gold was. So, why didn't they? Here's some guesses from someone who knows nothing about mining:

• Consultants are more expensive than that.
• By making it a "contest" they were able to reap advantages in publicity that made it more cost-effective -- making that $500K worth more.
• If they had put it up for bid, they would only have attracted companies that usually did this, and probably just those in their area. They also would have had the "protect your local data" mindset, which would have lead them to include monitoring provisions (e.g. NDAs) that would have increased their costs. Ultimately, these would reduce the "universe" of potential problem-solvers. With fewer people involved, fewer answers would have been put forth and, by extension, the results would not have been as exceptional.

And they were amazing --- something like a 10x increase in yield at 16% of the cost/oz. It's possible that this was an unusual situation -- having a mine "down the street" from a very productive competitor -- but, if not, this could become a very lucrative way of improving one's yields.

And it's all a matter of recognizing that some business-specific data is actually worth more when widely released than when held closely. Just like open-source software.

Me