Paul Graham: What Business Can Learn from Open Source
Paul Graham has posted another interesting article titled “What Business Can Learn from Open Source.”
In the open source world, software “wins” (becomes popular and widely used) or “loses” (is rejected) based on it’s quality, not because of marketing or strong-arm tactics. Paul also uses the example of blogs and how the best blogs become popular based on content quality. Here’s a sample:
The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the the best stuff prevails.
Does this sound familiar? It’s the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like commmunist states.
I can relate to a lot of the issues he brings up. The late night coding sessions in my college dorm room were probably some of the most productive times of my life. The environment there was hardly “professional”, with my roomate playing his stratocaster while watching the Sorpranos, and friends always stopping by. I’d trade a grey cube for that type of environment again any day.