Principles of Scientific Management

Scientific management ( is a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes work flow processes, improving labor productivity. The core ideas of the theory were developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s.   -Wikipedia

Certainly any kind of open source system needs some organizing set of principals for it to run smoothly. According to Taylor the (somewhat obvious) way to do  this is to structure a system by which benefits the worker when the end result benefits the company. For example, he argued that paying workers by the hour provided no incentive for them to work efficiently and managed several companies where he was able to pay the workers considerably more than they had been earning while still increasing his profits.

Seemingly, the Linux mode of production has achieved a way to reward its workers, who don’t even get paid at all. By working on what directly benifits you first, then sharing the results, all benifit.

“Tragedy of the Commons”

“The Tragedy of the Commons is the title of an influential article written by Garrett Hardin, first published in the journal Science in 1968.^[1] The article describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared resource even where it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen” -wikipedia

How can freely edited programs and services such as Wikipedia and Linux continue to function without anyone “hijacking” them for their own good? It seems that they can avoid the tragedy of the commons due to the fact that it is in so many peoples interest for them to be accurate and functional.

There is certainly a bias to Wikipedia however. This past summer, someone hacked into Wikipedia and revealed who wrote “anonymous” entries.  It seems that large companies such as McDonald’s and WalMart as well as the US government edited pages to paint themselves in a more favorable view. But the very fact that this was uncovered is reassuring to me as people can truly track where their information is coming from if they have time on their hands.