Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategyby Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel. Online, free, very good reading.
- The reasons to engage with open source include the following:
* Getting high-quality, free software and software design and development help.
* Making your software ubiquitous through participation and low cost.
* Engaging end-users in design and testing.
* Reducing time to market.
* Doing marketing and marketing research.
* Working with partners who prefer a loose relationship.
* Positioning a company.
* Harvesting innovation.
* Making standards.
* Building a brand through ubiquity and positioning vis-à-vis the open-source community.
* Adopting transparent development processes.
* Changing customer and market perceptions.
* Making a vision pervasive.
* Changing the rules.
* Reducing support costs.
* Injecting discipline into the development process.
* Improving integration.
* Satisfying more customers.
* Porting to otherwise unimportant platforms.
* Avoiding lock-in.
* Changing pricing practices.
* Signing up partners and creating consortia.
* Creating markets.
* Making ethical, moral, and political statements.
In Weapons of Mass Instruction, John Taylor Gatto writes:
- Open-source learning accepts that everything under the sun might be possible a starting point on the road to self-mastery and a good life…. And everyone you encounter is a potential teacher.
What’s not to like? Perhaps the Learning Irregulars should host a mash-up of Education+Open Source.
______________
Related: Open software at The Hillside Club
Follow Jay on Twitter
