Now that we’ve explored some other metaphors, let’s return to the Oceania metaphor. We’ve already seen how it can contribute to understanding the open source software paradigm. Now let’s try to understand this paradigm further by seeing what the Oceania metaphor leaves out. The alternative would be to try to elaborate the metaphor to incorporate additional characteristics, but that would rapidly become strained. A more interesting approach would be to write a work of fiction set in this new world, but that’s another project!
The Oceania metaphor leaves out the inhabitants of the islands, especially permanent residents and frequent visitors who can act as guides. And, of course, these inhabitants have their own culture and are intolerant of those ignorant of or insensitive to it. Without going into this topic in depth here, Steven Weber’s book The Success of Open Source has an interesting discussion of the nature of this community:
People often see in the open source software movement the politics that they would like to see – a libertarian reverie, a perfect meritocracy, a utopian gift culture that celebrates the economics of abundance instead of scarcity, a virtual or electronic existence proof of communitarian ideals, a political movement aimed at replacing obsolete nineteenth-century capitalist structures with new “relations of production” more suited to the Information Age.
In his view, open source software culture can in no sense be characterized as harmonious or Utopian.
The ocean in the Oceania metaphor may be flat in a topological sense, but the flatness Friedman refers to is really a level global playing field in terms of competition, as discussed in greater detail earlier. In Friedman’s analysis, open source software is a “flattener” – one of the forces that has removed geographic proximity as a competitive advantage, but this aspect is not explicitly conveyed by the Oceania metaphor.
The rugged terrain of Oceania’s islands includes swamps but no tar pits because tar pits on islands seemed too contrived to incorporate into the metaphor. This doesn’t mean that tar pits can be ignored, however, at least not the software development tar pits described by Fredrick Brooks in his influential book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering. First published in 1975, this author’s insights into the unique challenges of software development, especially the “tar pit” encountered by so many projects, constitute a seminal contribution to software engineering and project management. In a field rife with optimistic claims and marketing hyperbole, Brooks, a knowledgeable and respected former IBM system architect, offers a refreshing perspective, including Brooks’ Law (“Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”) and “All repairs tend to destroy structure, to increase the entropy and disorder of a system,” a point emphasized in Foote and Yoder’s Big Ball of Mud.
No birds at all soar above Oceania, and in particular, no atypically-colored swans – that is, rare events of spectacular success. European writers have long used black swans as a metaphor for rare events, but in Australia, which forms the western boundary of Oceania, black swans are the common color morph and white swans the rare one, like albinos in many mammalian species, hence the need for the more cumbersome adjective “atypically-colored.”
In his thought-provoking if rather discouraging free 2005 ebook On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile, available at http://www.kingsfieldpublications.co.uk, editor and publisher Michael Allen discusses the unrealistic hopes of aspiring literary authors that if only a publisher will accept their manuscript (that is, select it from among the heap of unsolicited manuscripts termed the “slush pile” in the publishing trade), they’ll be acclaimed as the next J.K. Rowling. In the conventional software industry, the corresponding rare event would be releasing a “killer app.”
Should there be atypically-colored swans in Oceania, or is it simply not suitable habitat? Atypically-colored swans can certainly be found in red oceans of Kim and Mauborgne, and perhaps more frequently in their blue oceans, but does this concept even apply in the bizarre competitive environment symbolized by Oceania’s gray ocean?