The Linux community has a system of independent, self-motivated hackers. But that isn’t the whole point. To understand the continued success of Linux, it is important to recognize that there is a method to the madness.

The Linux community has created a structured platform to support its innovation creators.

This is a little arcane, but it is interesting to see how this structured platform came about. Until 2002, the Linux project had one of the least conducive environments for innovation within the open-source community. The Linux community had all the key components for emergent innovation, including common understanding of who was who and what needed to be done, and the all important sense of ownership with the expectation of recognition for all the contributors to the system. The problem was that Torvalds wanted to make sure that all additions to the code went through him. Despite his best efforts, he was a one-man bottleneck. All that changed when many of the programmers in the effort convinced him to delegate some of the responsibility for maintaining the code, and start using some tools to speed the addition of new code into the Linux kernel.

The Linux community is now fairly mature and organized. Linux has a couple of official web sites. www.kernel.org has the source code. IBM, Intel, and others set up the Open-source Development Lab (OSDL). Basically, Torvalds works for the lab, while the OSDL acts like an association dedicated to accelerating Linux adoption. Formally, the OSDL “provides developers in the open-source community with access to a physical data center development infrastructure, a neutral site for common development, and access to enterprise-level hardware.”

From a business and innovation perspective, the OSDL acts just like ISDA in the financial derivatives world. The both provide a structured process for sharing information and facilitating innovation.

Without this structured platform, with its clearly defined rules of interaction, the Linux community would have splintered into competing projects in 2002, and would not be as nearly successful as it is today.