Industrial Evolution. Lyle Estill

is certainly what Piedmont has done.

      Another juncture where we depart from mainstream corporate America is when it comes to sharing information. We are the originators of “Open Biodiesel,” which borrowed heavily from the software industry.

      In the software world there is a radical notion called “open source,” where the source code is often free to its users. In the parlance of the open source world, it is “free as in speech, not free as in beer.”

      At the heart of the open source software proposition is the notion of a “community” of developers who work together to improve the product such that new features and functions can evolve rapidly. “Release early, and release often” is a common mantra from the world of open source.

      The idea is that a small company with a community of contributors can have a larger development reach than it can afford, thereby permitting it to compete with giant “proprietary” competitors with large bankrolls.

      In Small is Possible, I discussed how the principles of open source software development spilled over into community scale biodiesel. This caught the attention of Michael Tiemann, one of the founders of the open source movement.

      Michael invited me out to his company, Red Hat, to speak to a lunchtime crowd as part of their “Lunch and Learn” speaker series. That began a friendship that has spanned a bunch of readings, and speaking events, and panel discussions in the public eye that are not half as interesting as the lunches and breakfasts we have had along the way.

      At one point he introduced us to Tim O’Reilly’s venture capital firm. Rachel and Leif and I found ourselves in a San Francisco board room discussing our little biodiesel project with some extremely interested, well heeled, and powerful members of the open source community.

      When Red Hat launched opensource.com they invited me to contribute something on how open source principles can transcend the software industry. Here is the column I wrote called “Open Biodiesel”:

      I’ve had a number of career changes. I went from poetry to technology to metal sculpture to the Internet to biodiesel. And I must admit that although I have brushed against “open source” a number of times, I have had a hard time getting my head around it.

      Once I was working the show floor of USENIX in San Antonio, in 1998, the year Free BSD was released. It created quite a buzz. But I wasn’t sure what to do with such a thing.

      I later ended up as the CEO of an Internet company. The “bubble” had burst, the company I was to run was pretty much bankrupt, and my job was to fix it. As part of the turn around I invested in OpenNMS, which is an open source network management company. At the time I still didn’t know what “open source” meant.

      OpenNMS was (and still is) run by Tarus Balog. He’s a charismatic champion of the movement and I quickly fell under his spell.

      Tarus told me to read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which I did. Tarus took me to the Triangle Linux User Group. For a moment in time “open source” was my life.

      I’m not really a “turn around” guy. My brother Mark used to joke about my work on the Internet, saying, “They wanted a ‘turnaround artist’ and all they got was an ‘artist.’”

      During my time with OpenNMS I was migrating toward biodiesel. Biodiesel is a cleaner burning renewable fuel that is made from fats, oils, and greases. I was making the stuff in my back yard, and signed up for the fledgling Bio-Fuels program at Central Carolina Community College.

      I was busy scaling up biodiesel, and scaling down my life in the technology sector. Technology was making me narcoleptic. Biodiesel was lighting my fire. Tarus and OpenNMS went on to build an open source success story, while I abandoned them for a fifty-five gallon drum and a canoe paddle.

      I jumped in with Leif and Rachel (my instructors at the college), and together we founded Piedmont Biofuels. We had some early successes making fuel and were immediately confronted with a critical decision: Should we tell the world what we had learned or should we keep it a secret in order to parlay our knowledge into cash?

      We decided to take an “open” approach, and instead of applying for patents, and sealing our lips, we published our successes and failures on Energy Blog. Our work was free for the entire world to see.

      At the time the biodiesel industry in America was in its infancy, and as such it was shrouded in proprietary secrets and great advances, and complicated licensing schemes.

      Our work stood in stark contrast to an evolving industry, in which charlatans came and went, and “black box” solutions regularly emerged and disappeared. It was the Wild West for biodiesel and no one was sure what stories to believe.

      Piedmont’s notion of “open source biodiesel” immediately got traction in the grassroots biodiesel community and became the standard for how small projects should interact with one another. We had our flops. And we had our successes. And we published them all.

      In no time we found ourselves with an active consulting business. Our rates went from being a member of our Coop ($50.00 per year) to $50.00 per hour to $100.00 an hour to $200.00 dollars an hour in order to slow things down a bit. I’ve often thought, “Tarus would be proud.”

      As public money started flowing into our project in the form of grant awards, we stuck to the knitting. We offered free tours, and free information to anyone. Interest in our project built rapidly. Part of our message to public funders was that we would tell anyone anything they wanted to know.

      The fact that we were open source appealed to those with public money. I’m not sure any of us clearly knew what it meant, but funders wanted to know that if they bestowed grant money upon us, our stewardship of that money would benefit others. As a result we accidentally became a frequent recipient of both federal and state grants.

      But our commitment to open had a broader benefit. The biodiesel industry has had a bruising ride since its inception. The public doesn’t really understand biofuels, and the industry doesn’t tend to be “open” in an effort to make itself clear.

      When we were making fuel in the backyard we were quirky. For a moment there, when biofuels were going to save the world, we were sexy. We had a moment as rock stars. But when global commodity markets climbed to record highs in the summer of 2008, the whole food vs. fuel debate came to the fore and biofuels became evil. That’s when our industry made the cover of TIME magazine as a sham. And that’s when the United Nations accused those responsible for making biofuels of being guilty of “crimes against humanity.”

      We went from quirky to sexy to evil, and we continued to publish our stories along the way. As a result we had credibility that allowed us to survive where others died. As biofuels projects collapsed under the weight of “evil,” we persevered on the strength of our transparency alone.

      We have been “open” at every step along the way, and we feel that our openness has been critical to the success of our enterprise.

      At Piedmont Biofuels we have a lot of “firsts.” We have a number of breakthroughs under our belt. And we have shared both our “firsts” and our breakthroughs freely with the world along the way, and we have watched our industry rise and fall as it fumbles about with policy decisions that will determine the role of biodiesel in our energy mix.

      By some measures it is fair to characterize community-scale biodiesel as an industry that is open. Surely we receive as many good ideas as we contribute. And there is no doubt that we have benefited greatly from the community of small-scale producers.

      Just as the small open source software company can successfully compete with much larger proprietary rivals, our small biodiesel company looms larger than life because of its many contributions to industry knowledge.

      Which might not matter in the least. We still haven’t figured out how to eat fame. And we are still paying off the vast “tuition” we have paid as pioneers