James Surowiecki Quotes

In open-source in general, the power lies in connecting the author of the software directly to users, eliminating the middleman.

Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.

If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia - lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that's meaningful.

I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine.

I have really become a huge believer in the power of open source.

I started Linux because I wanted to see it on the desktop... I do hope that the desktop people would try to work together ... and work more on the technology than trying to make the login screen look really nice.

I'm an investor in MakerBot, which is a good example of the 'thingiverse'. The idea of applying collaboration and rapid iteration to things that we interact with and hold in our hands every day is super revolutionary.

During the Arab Spring, I learned all sorts of things from Twitter. I wouldn't necessarily trust that information, but it gave me ideas about questions to ask. You can really learn things from the wisdom of crowds.

The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.

In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.

I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia.

The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.

That's what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It's a positive feedback cycle.

Huge open source organizations like Red Hat and Mozilla manage the collaboration of hundreds of people who don't know one another and have spent no time hanging around the water cooler.

Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks.

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.

Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.

The free sharing and teaching of open source is incompatible with the notion of the solitary genius.

Today technology permits knowledge to bubble up from more dispersed sources that are filtered through more competitive mechanisms, sustaining a more decentralized and accurate system of social discovery. We can acquire general expertise without being beholden to particular experts.

This intelligence, or what I'll call "the wisdom of crowds," is at work in the world in many different guises. It's the reason the Internet search engine Google can scan a billion Web pages and find the one page that has the exact piece of information you were looking for. It's the reason it's so hard to make money betting on NFL games, and it helps explain why, for the past fifteen years, a few hundred amateur traders in the middle of Iowa have done a better job of predicting election results than Gallup polls have.

You can get really far by putting your ideas out there and letting other people build on them.

Nobody is as smart as everybody.

Microsoft loves Linux.

A lot of the foundational philosophical approaches of tech leaders are actually all about decentralization of power.

We know that flat and non-hierarchical systems use information best. I've tried to do that with my own company because it works better that way. And society at large will work better as well if we can get rid of these old institutions and hierarchies. New innovations like the block chain can make this possible.