12 ms·

The Pay-It-Forward Culture

79 points by websirnik 15y ago

JoachimSchipper 15y ago
Open source fits "pay it forward" very well. I'm a little surprised that it wasn't mentioned.
- 0x12 15y ago
  I think that is because the introduction is set in the past, when open source wasn't on the horizon yet.
  - lukeschlather 15y ago
    Open source was the rule rather than a choice in those days. Nobody would pay for source code that only ran on your hardware. It was only in the 80's that the closed source systems started to emerge.
    - ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago
      "Nobody would pay for source code that only ran on your hardware." Unless your hardware was a mainframe. IBM distributed quite a lot of code in source form, with the implied assurance that there were no cheap, alternative means to run it. OS/360 wasn't even copyrighted, which is why it's legal to run on today's PCs. IBM, without trying, and probably even without realizing it, was an early pioneer in the open source niche of this "Pay-It-Forward" culture. "SHARE Inc. is a volunteer-run user group for IBM mainframe computers that was founded in 1955 by Los Angeles-area IBM 701 users. A major resource of SHARE from the beginning was the SHARE library. Originally, IBM's operating systems were distributed in source form and it was common for systems programmers to make small local additions or modifications and to exchange them with other users. The SHARE library and the process of distributed development it fostered was one of the major origins of open source software." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing)
- icebraining 15y ago
  In fact, the GPL is a legal enforcement of the concept. Unlike the common misconception, you're not obliged to give back your modifications to the original dev - you're obliged to pay it forward by giving your users the same rights you got. (Whether this should be enforced legally is a different discussion, of course)
  - 0x12 15y ago
    Given the number of attempted GPL violations I think that the answer is 'yes', it should be enforced legally. Corporations would run roughshod over he rights of their users otherwise. The GPL is one of the most creative uses of the copyright system ever.
    - icebraining 15y ago
      I like what the GPL is trying to achieve, but frankly I dislike the 'collateral damage'; blocking proprietary software from using it is fine, but it also blocks the non-copyleft licensed (MIT, BSD, Apache, etc) projects from benefiting from the code. In the OSS/Free Software world, GPL takes and never "gives back". I'm not comfortable with that position.
- sac23e123 15y ago
  It's too bad that startups exiting with boatload of cash don't pay it "backward" to open source project they extensively leveraged.
jgrahamc 15y ago
"They were the beginning of the Pay-It-Forward culture, the unspoken Valley culture that believes "I was helped when I started out and now it’s my turn to help others." That's not how I interpret "pay it forward". I understood that to mean "I have done a good deed to you, now you do a good deed for someone else". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward The examples given are about mentoring and cooperation. Different, but heart warming nonetheless.
- 0x12 15y ago
  Those are the same things no? If you were helped out then someone did a good deed to you, now you repay the favor by doing a good deed to someone else. It's just 'out of phase' with respect to the starting point but otherwise perfectly equivalent. Like a co-sine wave looks just like a sine wave...
  - lutorm 15y ago
    It's just 'out of phase' It's the phase that makes it pay it _forward_ instead of backward. Obviously in every interaction, at most one of the actors can pay it forward.
    - 0x12 15y ago
      I think it is just a viewpoint shift. Whether you look at the two people that interact at one instant in time or at one person at two different points in their lives the chain remains the same. I've had plenty of help in the past and I'm giving plenty of help in the present (as much as I can, which is still way too little). That means that for me the 'pay it forward' mechanism is a very real component of my life. Those that are on the receiving end are not under any obligation, other than a moral one. And I'm pretty sure that for some of them the message is lost, but every now and then the spark lights a new flame. Pay it forward is an asynchronous mechanism, whether it actually worked or not you can't even determine in most cases.
      - dhimes 15y ago
robjohnson 15y ago
As someone who has only been in the software development culture for about two years, I can firmly say that it truly has some incredibly helpful people. People are always eager to help others (I.e. Stackoverflow, Lean startup circle, etc) and interestingly enough, humility is more common than one would expect from a group of absolute geniuses.
padobson 15y ago
'The goal of the club was: “Give to help others"' Why don't we see more companies with goals like this? The "avoid the negative" mottos are the popular thing in Silicon Valley these day (e.g. Google's "Don't be evil" and Facebook's "Don't be lame"). It seems to me that avoiding evil or lameness does very little to help you avoid other bad things. A corporate motto like "Pay it Forward" or "Excite the Customer" or "Be Entrepreneurs" or "Hack for Good" seems like one that would benefit a company and the ecosystem it operates in much more.
- aplusbi 15y ago
  I like Noise Bridge's guiding principle: "Be excellent to each other." (which is a quote from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure).
- bricestacey 15y ago
  It's easier to unite people against an evil than it is to advance a good.
euroclydon 15y ago
I'm surprised there's no attempt to reconcile the notions of: secrecy, competitive advantages and the corporate prime directive (to profit), with information sharing like in the Semi Conductor Fab example. I'm definitely not coming down on the other side of "pay-it-forward" and Steve seems to invoke the "rising tide lifts all boats" idea with the Finland dinner story, but surely there's a moral imperative not to spill the company beans.
- kragen 15y ago
  > surely there's a moral imperative not to spill the company beans. Surely. And yet, you can't build something like Silicon Valley by erring on the side of not spilling the company beans. You can only do it by sharing information, which is also a moral imperative. Fortunately, I've generally steered clear of that conflict myself, largely by having the good fortune to work for Silicon Valley companies that absorbed that ethic of openness. I've sometimes experienced that conflict, and in those cases I've usually kept mum about things that could have helped our competitors. Some of those things I still haven't talked about to this day, because keeping my word is very important to me. But I respect the decisions of other people who've chosen the opposite; I understand their reasoning, and it makes sense.
rmason 15y ago
In Michigan there are two things that I have observed that are done differently in Ann Arbor that have made it the states startup center: 1. Strong support for entrepreneurs by the University of Michigan 2. A pay it forward culture I think any city that has both has a fighting chance.
T_S_ 15y ago
I can't think of a better place that exemplifies this than Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.
sliverstorm 15y ago
I had no idea Fairchild was the grandfather of so many companies.

79 points by websirnik 15y ago

JoachimSchipper 15y ago

Open source fits "pay it forward" very well. I'm a little surprised that it wasn't mentioned.

0x12 15y ago
I think that is because the introduction is set in the past, when open source wasn't on the horizon yet.
- lukeschlather 15y ago
  Open source was the rule rather than a choice in those days. Nobody would pay for source code that only ran on your hardware. It was only in the 80's that the closed source systems started to emerge.
  - ThaddeusQuay2 15y ago
    "Nobody would pay for source code that only ran on your hardware." Unless your hardware was a mainframe. IBM distributed quite a lot of code in source form, with the implied assurance that there were no cheap, alternative means to run it. OS/360 wasn't even copyrighted, which is why it's legal to run on today's PCs. IBM, without trying, and probably even without realizing it, was an early pioneer in the open source niche of this "Pay-It-Forward" culture. "SHARE Inc. is a volunteer-run user group for IBM mainframe computers that was founded in 1955 by Los Angeles-area IBM 701 users. A major resource of SHARE from the beginning was the SHARE library. Originally, IBM's operating systems were distributed in source form and it was common for systems programmers to make small local additions or modifications and to exchange them with other users. The SHARE library and the process of distributed development it fostered was one of the major origins of open source software." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHARE_(computing)
icebraining 15y ago
In fact, the GPL is a legal enforcement of the concept. Unlike the common misconception, you're not obliged to give back your modifications to the original dev - you're obliged to pay it forward by giving your users the same rights you got. (Whether this should be enforced legally is a different discussion, of course)
- 0x12 15y ago
  Given the number of attempted GPL violations I think that the answer is 'yes', it should be enforced legally. Corporations would run roughshod over he rights of their users otherwise. The GPL is one of the most creative uses of the copyright system ever.
  - icebraining 15y ago
    I like what the GPL is trying to achieve, but frankly I dislike the 'collateral damage'; blocking proprietary software from using it is fine, but it also blocks the non-copyleft licensed (MIT, BSD, Apache, etc) projects from benefiting from the code. In the OSS/Free Software world, GPL takes and never "gives back". I'm not comfortable with that position.
sac23e123 15y ago
It's too bad that startups exiting with boatload of cash don't pay it "backward" to open source project they extensively leveraged.

jgrahamc 15y ago

"They were the beginning of the Pay-It-Forward culture, the unspoken Valley culture that believes "I was helped when I started out and now it’s my turn to help others." That's not how I interpret "pay it forward". I understood that to mean "I have done a good deed to you, now you do a good deed for someone else". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_it_forward The examples given are about mentoring and cooperation. Different, but heart warming nonetheless.

0x12 15y ago
Those are the same things no? If you were helped out then someone did a good deed to you, now you repay the favor by doing a good deed to someone else. It's just 'out of phase' with respect to the starting point but otherwise perfectly equivalent. Like a co-sine wave looks just like a sine wave...
- lutorm 15y ago
  It's just 'out of phase' It's the phase that makes it pay it _forward_ instead of backward. Obviously in every interaction, at most one of the actors can pay it forward.
  - 0x12 15y ago
    I think it is just a viewpoint shift. Whether you look at the two people that interact at one instant in time or at one person at two different points in their lives the chain remains the same. I've had plenty of help in the past and I'm giving plenty of help in the present (as much as I can, which is still way too little). That means that for me the 'pay it forward' mechanism is a very real component of my life. Those that are on the receiving end are not under any obligation, other than a moral one. And I'm pretty sure that for some of them the message is lost, but every now and then the spark lights a new flame. Pay it forward is an asynchronous mechanism, whether it actually worked or not you can't even determine in most cases.
    - dhimes 15y ago

robjohnson 15y ago

As someone who has only been in the software development culture for about two years, I can firmly say that it truly has some incredibly helpful people. People are always eager to help others (I.e. Stackoverflow, Lean startup circle, etc) and interestingly enough, humility is more common than one would expect from a group of absolute geniuses.

padobson 15y ago

'The goal of the club was: “Give to help others"' Why don't we see more companies with goals like this? The "avoid the negative" mottos are the popular thing in Silicon Valley these day (e.g. Google's "Don't be evil" and Facebook's "Don't be lame"). It seems to me that avoiding evil or lameness does very little to help you avoid other bad things. A corporate motto like "Pay it Forward" or "Excite the Customer" or "Be Entrepreneurs" or "Hack for Good" seems like one that would benefit a company and the ecosystem it operates in much more.

aplusbi 15y ago
I like Noise Bridge's guiding principle: "Be excellent to each other." (which is a quote from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure).
bricestacey 15y ago
It's easier to unite people against an evil than it is to advance a good.

euroclydon 15y ago

I'm surprised there's no attempt to reconcile the notions of: secrecy, competitive advantages and the corporate prime directive (to profit), with information sharing like in the Semi Conductor Fab example. I'm definitely not coming down on the other side of "pay-it-forward" and Steve seems to invoke the "rising tide lifts all boats" idea with the Finland dinner story, but surely there's a moral imperative not to spill the company beans.

kragen 15y ago
> surely there's a moral imperative not to spill the company beans. Surely. And yet, you can't build something like Silicon Valley by erring on the side of not spilling the company beans. You can only do it by sharing information, which is also a moral imperative. Fortunately, I've generally steered clear of that conflict myself, largely by having the good fortune to work for Silicon Valley companies that absorbed that ethic of openness. I've sometimes experienced that conflict, and in those cases I've usually kept mum about things that could have helped our competitors. Some of those things I still haven't talked about to this day, because keeping my word is very important to me. But I respect the decisions of other people who've chosen the opposite; I understand their reasoning, and it makes sense.

rmason 15y ago

In Michigan there are two things that I have observed that are done differently in Ann Arbor that have made it the states startup center: 1. Strong support for entrepreneurs by the University of Michigan 2. A pay it forward culture I think any city that has both has a fighting chance.

T_S_ 15y ago

I can't think of a better place that exemplifies this than Hacker Dojo in Mountain View.

sliverstorm 15y ago

I had no idea Fairchild was the grandfather of so many companies.