Are we all just spare cycles?

Chris Anderson of The Long Tail suggested recently that much of the work on open source is done through "spare cycles," and that such excess capacity is a major driver for progress. (Picture from Ken Conley.)

Scott Gilbertson of Wired immediately took umbrage, citing a study showing 65% of contributions to the Linux kernel are now produced by corporations, not individuals. Thus it's corporate ambition, not volunteerism, which drives open source.

I think they're both wrong. I believe the power of open source lies in sharing and structure.

Whether the contributions come from spare time or company time, the contributions are shared, in a structured way, to build a larger whole.

Both sharing and structure are necessary for an open source project to make progress. We've seen many projects go down due to lack of structure, while others fail due to a lack of contributions. Both sides of the open source brain must be engaged.

Traditionally structure was a corporate responsibility. Where open source changes things is that here the costs of that structure are often shared. It's this cooperation among competitors, which once took the name coopitition, that has been the signal business model change of our time.

Or maybe businesses just learned they too have spare cycles.