Java.sun.com, Sun's main Java site, has an interview with Ron Goldman,
who co-authored a book with Richard Gabriel, called "Innovation Happens
Elsewhere" which explores the complexities of open source. The book
grew out of their experiences at Sun helping colleagues build
communities around such open source projects as Jini technology, the
NetBeans IDE, OpenOffice, JXTA technology, java.net, and, most
recently, OpenSolaris. They looked around for good books that explored
business reasons for using open source or that looked at open source at
a strategic level and found none, so wrote a book themselves.
Goldman makes the following points:
* The key to successful open source projects is passionately shared
goals.
* There are always more smart people outside of a company than in it.
Hence, "Innovation Happens Elsewhere".
* The biggest misconception managers have is that they can cut back on
the number of people in their group working on a project by making open
sourcing it, because the community will pick up the slack. But in fact,
it's the opposite: An open-source project takes more resources than an
internal proprietary one.
* Another misconception is that open source is business as usual and
doesn't require fundamental change.
* Open source is not always appropriate and requires solid business
reasons. If what a company is thinking of open sourcing is not
something that others outside of the company care about, you won't get
a community.
* Users are often a neglected resource in open source communities.
Because they often are not programmers, they may not get a vote, but
who is better than the end-user at evaluating the software?
I have no direct experience with open source. I'm wondering if anyone
who has can comment on the accuracy of Goldman's observations.
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