Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy

Description

It's a plain fact: regardless of how smart, creative, and innovative your organization is, there are more smart, creative, and innovative people outside your organization than inside. Open source offers the possibility of bringing more innovation into your organization by building a creative community that reaches beyond the barriers of the organization. Interest in open source is strong enough that companies such as IBM, HP, and Cisco are starting to adapt their internal product lifecycle and development methodologies to accommodate the nature of open source. The growth and popularity of Weblogs and Wikis show that sharing is "in", along with the growing evidence that grassroots contributions can make significant contributions to a business by developing better products, reducing costs, injecting discipline into the development process, and satisfying more customers. The key is developing a community, what the authors call a type of Commons, driven by the web, where new types of collaboration and creativity can flourish. The authors, well-known software engineers, present lessons learned from their on experiences at Sun developing the network technology Jini, and from other successful open source projects such as Linux, Apache, and Mozilla, and years of fruitful participation in innovative communities of many sorts.

Describes how open source development works, and the business reasons for using it
Shows how open source projects work in a day-to-day manner, and discuses various licenses in use, and what makes for a successful project
Written in a engaging, accessible style that addresses the human issues in open source development