What Business Can Learn from Open Source
Thanks Tung (where’s the blog?) for the del.icio.us link to: What Business Can Learn from Open Source.
Excellent article coming out of some talks from OSCON. Wish I was there — I’m so jealous.
From the article:
Anyone who knows me, may know that this is truly something I believe in, and am a product of: my current “employer,” whom I find myself referring to as my “sponsor” more often, has this arrangement with me. I can attest that the “projects” I am involved with for my sponsor have been more wildly successful than we both could have imagined. Why is that? Why did I stay up crazy nights and weekends working on an end-to-end mobile-app running on Windows Mobile Smartphones, using Secure XML Web Services to a custom built app-server? Why am I spending the weekends hacking linux kernels, assembling teams and scoping projects, working, and researching web development? Because I love it and want to work on it!
In all serious-ness, any coder/hacker would love to hear this — and to play devil’s advocate for just one second, there has to be a happy medium where too much freedom (or too much responsibility) can cause these kinds of relationships to fail. I, personally believe that without having experienced a “corporate” job, to have a comparison and see what “billable hours” really means, or a well-rounded education (read: difficult, abstract, how-to-learn versus learn-one-thing-well) this wouldn’t have worked. But it is working!
And if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to back “work.” I’ve got shareholders and myself to please….
