ChiefNode

The Economist has an article on open source - what's happening now & the structure of the community. My favorite parts:

*Acknowledgement that there aren't that many "regular Joes" and "regular Joesephines" making large contributions to open source. It's a business, folks. It's just a different way of doing business -- getting folks to make suggestions, and actually listening to them -- but not necessarily accepting their "solutions."
"In other words, open source is starting to look much less like a curiosity of digital culture and more like an enterprise, with its own risks and rewards."
. . and later in the article. .
"MySQL employs 60 developers, based in 25 countries, of whom 70% work from home. “We maintain full governance of the source code. That allows us to go to the commercial users of the product and guarantee the product,” explains Mr Mickos. “You could say that this is what they pay for.”

*And, open is hard. Most people assume "open" is easier, because it is the land of milk and honey and all things good. But keeping things open is hard, and you must dedicate yourself to keeping it open.
"Strikingly, even more monitoring of operations is required in open source than in other sorts of businesses."

Now, open source is not inherently good or bad, but one should realize that open source is not altruistic or necessarily a better way to reach the public. One blindspot in the Economist article is that it largely examined older, established open source tools & communities. New approaches, newer communities may be different. However, Steven Weber is quoted in the article stating that he's not sure open source can do "new" things.

posted by Dana Bostrom @ 14:14