Symbiosis - Making the Clever Beautiful

In one of my recent posts, I may have left the impression that OpenSource doesn't greatly enhance our software experience. But that's just not true. OpenSource is a great place to innovate and discover how to fulfill the needs of the software user. The initial OpenSource software is normally quite technical and clever, and one of the reasons I started this blog is that software pervades our life, and the true benefits of innovation are realized as it enters mainstream use. For that, the clever must be made beautiful.

So why did I title this symbiosis? I read a great article in Make magazine called "Make Like Picasso". It says that Picasso said that when you first make complicated things, they are ugly, and someone follows who makes them pretty. The article goes on: "functionally clever things deserve to be pretty". And I agree. I believe that we need symbiosis to achieve that.

Symbiosis is more than a complementary relationship. Two are dependent on one another. Without both, each fails.

Some of our best innovations have failed when this is not understood. In order to be successful, General Motor's original electric car, the EV1, needed California to pass a law that they were necessary. This happened. Further, the car needed to be useful to the public. This happened. Then GM needed to continue to find value in the car, expand it to the rest of the states and other markets. This didn't happen.

The Greeks believed that you could determine beauty through the Golden Ratio. With the Golden Ratio you can measure harmony. Harmony requires balance.

After the initial roll out of the EV1, GM did not have the same level of commitment to its success as the users. Balance did not exist. Without it, symbiosis did not exist. Without that, the EV1 failed. What that meant was that instead of GM being ahead of everyone as this gas crisis has hit, we have had limited choices in auto alternatives. Neither of us has been as successful as we could have been.

In contrast, as Open Source, and the Linux operating system especially, became more popular, companies like Red Hat understood that a partnership was needed to allow the mainstream to achieve the full benefits of Open Source. Software development is benefiting greatly from the symbiosis relationships developing between Open Source innovation and its application.