thesis

24 Secrecy vs. Openness
an organization’s decision to open source certain activities would not be sustainable
if it would not result in superior innovations, higher efficiency, and lower transaction
costs in the long run.
Weber correctly identifies “two factors that transaction cost theory does not emphasize”,
including “the relationship between problem-solving innovation and the
location of tacit information” and “the importance of principles and values, in contrast
to efficiency” (2004, p. 267). Therefore, an organisation’s or, more neutrally, an
actor’s decision to go open source is not merely an “efficiency choice around distributed
innovation” (2004, p. 265). Much depends on the structuring and organization
of knowledge in that domain. The distribution of tacit knowledge across
several independent actors, the necessity of such knowledge for problem-solving, the
culture of both sharing knowledge and relying on that shared knowledge are different
in some societal domains such as medicine than in others, like software (2004, pp.
268-270). Sharing and using knowledge reflects shared principles and values among
collaborators at least regarding how knowledge should be distributed in a particular
domain or community (2004, p. 267). Weber discusses the idea of distributed
problem solving among physicians and genomic researchers. He highlights how a
barely developed sharing culture in the communities of both physicians and genomics
scientists has stymied distributed collaboration in these two branches of the
medical domain. Another stumbling block for the open source method in genomics
is governmental regulation. This is despite the “structure of medical
knowledge”, which is widely distributed among countless experts. A superficial
glance at traditional security governance practices suffices to hypothesize that the
domain of security is packed with regulatory and cultural hurdles for the open
source method. On the other hand the structure of security-relevant knowledge is
widely distributed and the “key issue [of] organization of knowledge sharing”
(2004, p. 268) has been solved in favour of the open source model in the information
technology domain.
To sum up, a wide range of factors act as determinants of an institutional design.
Whether the list of these factors is sufficient, the overall relevance of a respective
factor on the viability of open source production is not clear. Neither is it apparent
which institutional design will evolve or actors will chose when a few of the aforementioned
factors are detrimental for the viability of the open source method in a
particular context, while the majority of them support it. It is not clear which factor
is nice-to-have and which ones are sine qua non. Until then, the voluntary application
of the open source method as an organising principle in other domains than
software is “experimenting” and “requires learning by doing” (2004, p. 268). Weber’s
decade-old question is still valid: “What happens at the interface, between
networks and hierarchies, where they meet?” (2004, p. 262)