open source in the corporate world

November 28, 2008

Ted Leung reflects on open source and the corporate world in an interview on herding code. It is a bit long for the typical web attention span (over an hour), but worth listening to.

Notes…
* Companies benefits by releasing something that they know people want/need.
* Developers want access to be able to do something collaboratively with the product, to contribute code so that the next version will have the feature or bug fix they need.
* In open source, intelligence is distributed, so it is harder to kill
* Let people decide what they like, economic benefits accrue to the popular
* Ted wants to see as large a substrate for innovation as possible and sees open source as a way to do that
* We’re not there yet… people who are good at blogging cause their projects to be more widely adopted, which doesn’t necessarily cause the best stuff to win

Further reading…
* The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman & Rod A. Beckstrom
* Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel (Read Ted’s review)
* slides from Ted’s talk on open source anti-patterns

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