Inspired by Work

Most of the gurus who describe the changing nature of work agree on some basic points: People do their best work when they're motivated by a sense of purpose. More and more work is becoming teamwork, and small, committed teams tend to do the best work. In a world of email, Web pages, and instant messaging, it's never been easier to work closely with people you've never met and who live in places you've never visited. Put simply, we are developing some radically new answers to some of the most fundamental issues about work: why people work, how they work, and what they expect from their work.

Eric S. Raymond, 41, has been thinking differently about work -- and working differently -- for the past 15 years. He is a provocative writer, an engaging speaker, and an accomplished hacker. Most of all, he's an influential evangelist for perhaps the most important new phenomenon in software. Raymond is a visible and vocal advocate of open-source software -- a radically different approach to software development that has produced, most famously, the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, and the Perl scripting language.

What distinguishes open-source programs from other computer applications is that the core technology -- the underlying source code -- is totally visible and freely available to anyone who wants it. There are no patents, no trade secrets, no intellectual-property protections whatsoever. That's because no one person or company "owns" the software. A global, volunteer army of programmers create the software. These people work hard to fix bugs and develop new features mainly because they want to.

That may sound weird -- but it works. The Linux operating system had some 12 million users at the end of 1998, and Raymond estimates that there are about 750,000 developers scattered around the world. Linus Torvalds, now 29, who created Linux back when he was a college student in his native Finland, has become the technology world's latest celebrity geek. Meanwhile, Apache has the market-share lead in Web-server software, running on roughly 60% of the world's Web sites. And where users go, IPOs usually follow. Red Hat Software Inc., the best-known entrant in a growing field of companies working to commercialize Linux, recently went public -- and achieved a stunning market value of nearly $5 billion.

The rise of open-source development surprised many of the technology world's smartest leaders. But it didn't surprise Eric Raymond. He's been participating in the movement for years. (He actually runs an open-source project called fetchmail.) He's also been writing a series of influential white papers that explain how open-source programmers do their work. His first paper, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," is legendary for its radical arguments and far-reaching influence. He has since written two sequels, "Homesteading the Noosphere" and "The Magic Cauldron."

His message? "People do their best work," he says, "when they are passionately engaged in what they're doing." In an interview with Fast Company, Raymond explains what the rise of the open-source community means for the rest of us -- what it says, not just about the future of software, but about the future of work.

Pretend you're addressing an audience of 500 human-resources professionals, most of whom have never heard of Linux or Apache. What can they learn from the open-source phenomenon?

There's one lesson that's really obvious: You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level gets.

In other words, enjoyment predicts efficiency. When are programmers happy? They're happy when they're not underutilized -- when they're not bored -- and also when they're not overburdened with inappropriate specifications or meaningless bureaucracies. In other words, programmers are happiest when they're working efficiently. This is a general preference in creative work. People are happiest when they're the most productive. People enjoy tasks, especially creative tasks, when the tasks are in the optimal-challenge zone: not too hard and not too easy. To some extent, that has always been true. But it becomes even more true as work becomes more about brains and creativity.

The flip side is that when people are frustrated with their work environments -- when they don't trust the institutions they work for -- it is virtually impossible for them to do great work. So you can ask the open-source community, "Why are so many people willing to devote themselves to do work for which few of them get paid?" You can also look at traditional companies and ask, "Why do even top executives hang 'Dilbert' cartoons on their office doors?" There's nothing funny about the popularity of "Dilbert." Companies should take that more seriously than they seem to.