Showing posts with label Matt Asay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matt Asay. Show all posts

26 September 2010

Sharing: Theft or Duty?

I regard Matt Asay as one of the most perceptive commentators on the world of free software and related areas. So I was rather disappointed to read the following in one of his recent columns, which dealt with the BSA's highly dodgy claims about piracy:

I don't mean to diminish the wrong nature of stealing software. Theft is theft and should be punished.

Here's what I wrote to him:

It is very hard to steal software: unless you creep into a computer store and steal the boxes (do they still exist?). As you know, what really happens is that somebody makes a copy of software: that is not theft, of course, that is copyright infringement. If I make a copy of a piece of software, the original still exists, but there is now a copy that I have. I have stolen nothing - I've actually created something - but I *have* infringed on copyright.

But wait, you will say, when you make that perfect copy you are *effectively* stealing the money that you would have paid for a legal copy. Except that you yourself write: "$1 in "lost" licensed revenue would not magically become $1 in proprietary software sales if piracy were reduced. It's very likely that users would elect to spend their money elsewhere." Exactly: couldn't have put it better myself. You can't start talking about that money that wasn't spent as if it were real and concrete: it's not, it's notional.

Of course, it is probably true that some fraction of the people with pirated copies *would* have bought genuine ones had they not made the copy: so that is truly lost revenue. But it also probably true that pirated copies act as marketing samplers and encourage other people to buy legitimate copies that they wouldn't otherwise have bought – to get support, updates etc. (Indeed, in the world of music, there are half a dozen studies that suggest this is the case.) After all, giving away software for free is the basis of many businesses based around open source.

Calling copyright infringement "theft" really plays into the hands of organisations like the BSA that put out these deliberately misleading studies. "Theft" is an emotive word that biases the reader against the people involved. If you call it "copyright infringement", and note that copyright is a time-limited, state-granted *monopoly* - and I think everyone accepts that monopolies are generally bad things - then copyright infringement simply means infringing on a monopoly. That's a rather different emotional bundle, I think, and a better one to place in opposition to the BSA's manipulations.

Since Matt's reply to me was a private email, I won't quote it here, but essentially his answer was that artists can set the terms under which we access their works, whether or not they are reasonable terms, because ultimately it's their creation.

It's a good point, and so I'll try to explain here why I don't think it's correct.

In fact, artists manifestly don't have an absolute right to choose whatever terms they like under which their works are distributed. In many countries, for example, they are limited by the first-sale doctrine. This means they cannot impose the condition that their book or CD, say, once purchased, must never be sold on second-hand, or given away. So already there are limits to what they can demand.

This is accepted, presumably, because there is a broad consensus that this kind of limitation is not reasonable, and that artists should be obliged, by law if necessary, to give up what they might otherwise have seen as a natural “right”.

What this comes down to, then, is a question of what is generally accepted as reasonable. A big problem with digital copies is that we have never lived in a digital world before, so we have not yet established the social norms there that ultimately will allow laws to be framed to capture what is deemed fair.

Not allowing people to make personal copies and share them for non-commercial use is, I believe, exactly like not allowing people to sell their books second-hand, or to give them away (note that I am not extending this to intentional commercial-scale copyright infringement, which is almost by definition criminal because conducted with the specific aim of depriving creators of their sales.)

It is an unreasonable restriction that will, ultimately, I believe, be seen by the majority of society as such. Indeed, the fact that so many young and even not-so-young people share files today already suggests that we are moving to that point fast.

So, why do I think this is unfair? In many ways it is similar to the thinking behind allowing people to give away or sell books second-hand - and note that in the latter case actual money is involved, whereas it almost never is with personal file sharing, so the latter is actually *less* harmful than the situation in the analogue world. But I am more interested in the giving away of books, so I'll concentrate on that.

When we pass on a book to a friend, or just give it away to a charity shop, say, we are really passing on the experience of reading that book, and the knowledge to be gained from it. It is an intensely social act of generosity, a desire to share a pleasure with our fellow human beings. It allows us to manifest our best qualities, and it can also be an opportunity for us to contribute to the general improvement of society – for example, by passing on an educational book, or one that encourages readers to engage in some activity that is beneficial to all (recycling waste, or becoming more tolerant, say.)

So if we were forbidden from sharing our books with friends and strangers, the world would be a poorer place in many ways, since we lose all these opportunities for generosity and contributing, albeit indirectly, to society's progress. Indeed, it's interesting that many people are finding one of the biggest drawbacks of otherwise convenient e-books is that you often *can't* share them in this way: this makes them a far more lonely, and hence rather sadder pleasure.

Of course, there is one important difference between analogue goods like books and digital ones like music or texts. Whereas I can only share an analogue object with one person, digital artefacts can be copied endlessly, allowing me to multiply my generosity and the joy received from it hundreds, thousands or even millions of times.

Not being able to share digital files turns out to be far worse than not being able to share analogue ones like second-hand books in terms of the positive benefits foregone. Moreover, you don't even have to give up your original copy where digital artefacts are concerned, so there is no disincentive for you to share it; some might even say that the social benefits of doing so are so great, that you actually have a duty to share....

Society has already decided that being unable to share second-hand goods is an unreasonable condition for creators to impose. I believe that we will come to the same conclusion for the sharing of digital files, where the case for allowing such non-commercial, personal transfer is even stronger.

After all, this is not some abstract issue. Currently, billions of people in developing countries cannot access huge swathes of transformative, liberating knowledge because of copyright laws, or are denied life-saving medicines because of drug patents. Being able to share is literally a matter of life and death.

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03 June 2010

Why Patents are Like Black Holes

When a big enough star dies, it generally implodes, and forms a voracious black hole capable of swallowing anything that comes too close. When a big enough company dies, all that remains is a bunch of patents that can have a similarly negative effect on companies whose business models are too close.

He's Mike Masnick's commentary on the area:

It looks like just about all that's left of former telco equipment giant Nortel is a whole bunch of patents, that are now expected to sell for somewhere in the range of $1.1 billion. The big question, of course, is who ends up with those patents, and what they do with them. Generally speaking, you don't see companies spend $1.1 billion on a bunch of patents, unless they're planning something big. It's entirely possible someone will buy them for defensive purposes, but equally likely that they're used to sue lots of other companies (or, perhaps by the likes of Intellectual Ventures, to scare people into paying up to avoid the possibility of being sued).

And of course, in the field of open source, the really worrying dying star is Novell, as Matt Asay points out:

As reported, as many as 20 organizations have registered bids for Novell, most (or all) of them private equity firms. While an Oracle or a Cisco might acquire Novell for its maintenance streams and product portfolio, it's unclear that private equity firms will have the same motivation. For at least some of these, there will be serious pressure to sell Novell's assets to the highest bidder, regardless of the consequences to Novell's existing customers or to the wider industry.

This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Novell has a treasure trove of patents, with at least 450 patents related to networking, office productivity applications, identity management, and more.

Worth noting is that among those patents are some relating to Unix...

These cases show yet again why patents just don't do what they are supposed to - encourage innovation - but act as very serious threats to other companies that *are* innovating. As more and more of these software stars die, so the number of patent black holes will increase, and with them the unworkability of the patent system. Time to reboot that particular universe...

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

11 November 2009

Why SAP is a Sap

There's some interesting turbulence in the blogosphere about the following call from Dr. Vishal Sikka, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of SAP:

To ensure the continued role of Java in driving economic growth, we believe it is essential to transition the stewardship of the language and platform into an authentically open body that is not dominated by an individual corporation. Java should be free of any encumbrances to permit fair competition between compatible implementations for the benefit of customers. By preserving the integrity of Java, the IT industry can ensure a vibrant developer community and continued innovation for enterprise software customers. This ensures the continued global economic success brought about through open innovation.


Matt Asay rightly calls him out on this:

Irony, thy name is SAP.

SAP, after all, is hardly the most open-source or open-process friendly company on the planet. Despite early involvement in Eclipse, some interaction with MySQL (MaxDB), and a new commitment to the Apache Software Foundation, SAP remains a firmly proprietary company.

Even Microsoft, which arguably has the most to lose from open source, has consistently and continually experimented with greater open-source involvement.

SAP? Not so much. In large part, SAP hasn't been forced to embrace open source because it hasn't been threatened by it. ERP (enterprise resource planning) is such a complex beast that it has remained largely impervious to open source (with the exception of open-source start-ups like Compiere and Openbravo, to which I'm an adviser).

Now, Dirk Riehle is stepping into the fray:

I don’t think that this is a fair critique. SAP has always provided the source code of its main business applications suite to user-customers as part of a commercial license, and users have always customized SAP’s business suite to their heart’s content. In fact, it is the only way to make it work for their needs.

That may well be the case, but I think it's irrelevant.

The real reason SAP's call is hypocritical is this document [.pdf], essentially a love-letter to software patents, submitted as an amicus curiae brief to the European Patent Office. Software patents are simply incompatible with free software, because they are government-granted monopolies designed to *stop* people sharing stuff. They also prevent hackers from writing new code because they represent an ever-present digital sword of Damocles hanging over them.

SAP simply cannot claim to be a true friend of openness while it also supports software patents in any jurisdiction, in any form - the same applies to other companies, too, I should note. They can share as much code as they like, but until they repudiate software patents - for example, by placing their patent portfolios in the public domain - that's little more than window-dressing.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

17 June 2009

Open Source in the Enterprise: Safely Boring

Yesterday I popped into part of the London Open Source Forum. This was a laudable effort organised by Red Hat in conjunction with some of its partners to corrupt young and innocent minds – well, senior managers, at least – and convince them about the immanent wonderfulness of open source. To that end, they wheeled out some of the big names in the enterprise free software world like Matt Asay, Simon Phipps and Jan Wildeboer....

On Open Enterprise blog.

31 December 2008

Proud to be Lesser

Matt has some thoughts on blogs - including this one:

my primary interest is in digging up what's not already "popular." Unfortunately, I'm as guilty as anyone of recycling "news," but real traffic comes from breaking new ground, and I find that by scouring Digg and much lesser-known blogs.

...

no Drudge Report for me. Instead I'll be reading OpenDotDotDot and other "lesser" blogs. Hopefully this will keep translating into rising Open Road readership in 2009. Maybe we'll break the top-5,000,000 by 2012. One can dream....

Thanks, Matt...I think.

Actually, I feel exactly the same way: I'd much rather read Matt's informed writing on The Open Road - born of real analytical intelligence *and* hands-on experience - than the frothy nonsense served up by "leading" blogs.

The latter are most interested in traffic and in maintaining their position as blogosphere personalities: famous for being famous. They rarely contribute a deeper understanding of the world they write about.

That's what we "lesser" blogs are for.

28 July 2008

Real Dan Lyons: Really Good

As so often, I'm with Matt on this one: good as he was when the Fake Steve jobs, Dan Lyons is even better as himself. This is particularly sharp analysis - not just of Apple, but of the twisted thinking of the PR people behind it:

If Nocera had simply refused to go off the record, the burden would have remained on Jobs to get his message out and to do it openly or suffer continued hits to Apple stock. By going off the record, Nocera let himself get played by Jobs and Apple. Consider this. What if Jobs is lying? I’m not saying he is. But gods have been known to lie, especially when dealing with mere mortals. Think of how Zeus looked upon humans and you get an idea how Jobs views pretty much everyone in the world who isn’t Steve Jobs.

If Apple lies in a press release, or if its CEO lies in an on-the-record statement, the company has problems. But if everything was off the record, who’s to know? Or maybe you don’t exactly lie but you kind of hint at something and shade the conversation and lead someone to believe something even without explicitly saying that thing.

If down the road it turns out Steve was lying and someone from the SEC or some lawyer in a civil suit wants to find out what was said in that conversation, they’ll have to subpoena Joe Nocera, and the New York Times will fight that request. Even if Joe Nocera wants to tell the world what Steve Jobs told him, he can’t. He made a deal. He went off the record. Even if Steve turns out to be lying, Joe Nocera is stuck.

More generally:

One of the many ironies and contradictions about Apple is that while the company presents this hip, open, cool image to the world, its PR machine is the most secretive, locked-down, hard-assed and disciplined of any company in tech, including IBM.

This is one reason why Apple sticks in my craw. As what Lyons has nicely dubbed a "freetard", I just find the company too keen on closed for my liking. That said, I think Shuttleworth is absolutely right that Apple is now the one to beat....

17 June 2008

SproutCore Sprouts From Nowhere...

...well, at least as far as I'm concerned:

Apple, continuing its reliance on open-source technologies, is using an open-source project called SproutCore to provide rich Internet applications like its new MobileMe service.

The idea is to use to keep Apple from being "locked into the browser plug-ins for...one particular standard."

Never heard of it, but if it offers a completely open alternative to the dreaded Flash, put me down for two of them....

05 March 2008

Latin America Loves GNU/Linux

I was vaguely aware of the open source activity going on in Latin America, but I lacked the big picture. Matt Asay points to this feature, which provides a nice overview of the situation, country by country. It concludes:

In South American countries, as in most other areas of the world, the government is by far the biggest purchaser of software. Thus the Open Source trend that is now established in the government sector across the continent will doubtless spur Open Source adoption in the private sector.

There are a variety of motives for Open Source adoption in play in there, from the reduction in software costs to the desire to provide a "leg-up" to the local software industry. However, the motivation of the Peruvian government is unique in that the Peruvian supporters of the bill see "Open Source" as a citizen's right. The ownership and responsibility for the use of data and software have become a political issue in Peru.

This is an idea that is unlikely to go away.

28 December 2007

2007 By Numbers

It's been a great year for free software, which just keeps on getting better and more widely adopted. And if you can't quite remember who, what, when, why or how, try these excellent listings from Matt Asay and Tristan Nitot for open source and Mozilla respectively.

23 December 2007

Beaten to the Blog

News that IBM was buying Solid Information Technology, a company with close ties to MySQL, set off a distant bell ringing in my head in connection with something I'd written a while back, but I didn't have the time to pursue it.

Now, it seems, I don't need to:

When [Monty Widenius] started MySQL, I worked for this other small database company, Solid Information Technology. I told Monty that his project was just going to fail, and that it was a stupid thing to do, and that he didn't have a chance because we had a chance.

GM: What was your view of the Free Software world when you were at Solid--were you even aware of it?

MM: I was getting more aware of it, and I was getting excited about it. At Solid, I drove an initiative of not open-sourcing the product, but making it very popular on the Linux platform--and that was why I was an advertiser in Linux Journal, because we were the leading Linux database in the world in 1996. We gave it away free of charge, so we had taken a step in that direction.

Then Solid decided to cancel the project and just focus on high-end customers, and that's when I left the company. So in that sense, when I got to MySQL, I had some unfinished business. By that time, I had completely bought into the notion of code being open.

Thanks, Matt, for beating me to it....

05 November 2007

Open Source and Virtual Deals

As usual, Matt Asay is spot-on with his analysis of Fonality's acquisition of Insightful Solutions, especially here:

With this Fonality + Insightful/SugarCRM solution, customers will benefit from a unified solution that connects employees with presence management, instant messaging, fixed and mobile calling, and provides a single 360-degree view of customers and business partners.

Given SugarCRM's technology role in this deal, I'm surprised that SugarCRM wasn't involved in the press release. However valuable Insightful's technical understanding of SugarCRM, it's still SugarCRM's code that sits at the heart of this acquisition.

Having said that, it's perhaps telling that open source enables a close relationship with SugarCRM...without a close relationship. Most of SugarCRM's code is open, thereby enabling Insightful to build expertise that would be difficult to achieve with a proprietary product.

In effect, deals can be "done" without asking permission or even telling the other partners involved. The latter nonetheless benefit from the enrichment of the ecosystem surrounding their products that new uses generate.

19 October 2007

Ballmer Will Buy (Into) Open Source

"We will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products," Ballmer said during an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

A refusal to consider acquisitions of open-source developers "would take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically," Ballmer said -- a tacit acknowledgment of how thoroughly open-source development has reshaped the software market.

I don't think Steve really realises what he is saying: you can't just buy an open source company, you have to buy *into* the entire culture - it's the only way the company's product can survive. In other words, Microsoft would have to become - if only in part - an open source company, as I've maintained it would for a while, now. (See also Matt Asay's interesting thoughts on who exactly Ballmer might be getting his chequebook out for.)

10 September 2007

Writing the Book on Open Documentation

One of the things I really like about Matt Asay's blog is its total candour, which extends to handing out what most companies would regard as confidential business information:

the vast majority of our deals are fed by two direct sources: those who read our documentation and those who actually download and try our Enterprise code. Now, we also know that most of these people first start with our Community code (and often evaluate it for months, reading documentation and visiting our website in the meantime).

What does this mean? It means that if our demand generation software is telling us that someone has both read documentation and evaluated Enterprise, the odds of them buying support from Alfresco are huge. We want to be calling that prospect immediately.

But it also means that documentation is a huge opportunity for open-source companies to drive sales. Documentation is often treated as the shabby cousin of software development, but it is really the essential link between development and dollars. It's hard to motivate good documentation.

The other lesson I'd draw from this is that open source (and selling it) is far less about the code than you might think. Similarly, I'd say that open content, for example, is not just about the raw words, images or the sounds, but very much the "documentation" - that is, the packaging/service - that you provide around it, too.

31 August 2007

The Other Free Software Lawyer

There seems to be some magic about free software: whenever a certain class of (intelligent) lawyer comes into contact with it, it redeems them, and turns them into enlightened benefactors. Eben Moglen is the paradigmatic case, but here's another: Mark Radcliffe. You don't have to take my word - this is what Matt has to say:

If it has to do with open source and it affects your rights therein, Mark was probably at the fulcrum.

16 August 2007

Open Source's Best-Kept Secret Redux

About 18 months ago, I wrote a post called "Open Source's Best-Kept Secret" about Eclipse, how wonderful it was, and yet how few knew about it. Now what do I find?

Eclipse may be the most important open-source "project" that people outside the industry, and even some within it, have never heard of.

Yup, Matt and I agree again. His piece is an excellent interview with the head of Eclipse, Mike Milinkovich. I also interviewed him recently, for my feature about the open source ecosystem in Redmond Magazine. Matt's ranges more widely, and is probably the best intro to what Eclipse is up to, how it functions, and why it is so important.

Indeed, I wonder whether it will actually prove to be the most important open source project of all in the long term. As Matt points out:

In late June, Eclipse made available the largest-ever simultaneous release of open-source software, called Europa: 17 million lines of code, representing the contributions of 310 open-source developers in 19 countries. Twenty-one new tools were included in the "Europa" release, all free to download.

Think about that. The Linux kernel has around 6 million lines of code.... The Java Development Kit that Sun open sourced has 6.5 million.... Sun's StarOffice release in 2000 (which was believed to be the largest open-source release to that point) had 9 million.... Firefox has 2.5 million.

Yeah, think about it....

15 August 2007

O'Reilly? I Think Not

Once again, Matt gets it, and Tim doesn't:

"I will predict that virtually every open source company (including Red Hat) will eventually be acquired by a big proprietary software company."

Thus spake Tim O'Reilly in the comments to one of his other posts. Tim believes that open source, at least as defined by open-source licensing, has a short shelf-life that will be consumed by Web 2.0 (i.e., web companies hijacking open-source software to deliver proprietary web services) or by traditional proprietary software vendors.

In other words, why don't I just give up, sell out, and go home? I guess I would if I thought that Tim were right. He's not, not in this instance.

There's something more fundamental going on here than "Proprietary software meets open source. Proprietary software decides to commandeer open source. Open source proves to be a nice lapdog to proprietary software." I actually believe that open source, not proprietary software, is the natural state of the industry, and that Tim's proprietary world is anomalous.

I particularly liked this distinction between the service aspects of software, and the attempts to view it as an instantiation of various intellectual monopolies:

Suddenly, the license matters more, not less, because it is the license that ensures the conversation focuses on the right topic - service - rather than on inane jabberings that only vendors care about. You know, like intellectual property.

And there's another crucial reason why proprietary software companies can't just open their chequebooks and acquire those pesky open source upstarts. Unlike companies who seem to think that they are co-extensive with the intellectual monopolies they foist on customers, open source outfits know they are defined by the high-quality people - both employees and those out in the community - that code for the customers.

For example, one reason people take out subscriptions to Red Hat's offerings is that they get to stand in line for the use of Alan Cox's brain. Imagine, now, that proprietary company X "buys" Red Hat: well, what exactly does it buy? Certainly not Alan Cox's brain, which will leave with him (one hopes) when he moves immediately to another open source company (or just hacks away in Wales for pleasure). Sure, the purchaser will have all kinds of impressive legal documents spelling out what it "owns" - but precious little to offer customers anymore, who are likely to follow wherever Alan Cox and his ilk go.

27 July 2007

Opening Up Advertising

As the post below indicates, one reason that open content strategies are working is that online advertising is increasingly profitable (just ask Google). Further proof that advertising is evolving rapidly is the rise of OpenAds, one of open source's better-kept secrets. Here's a piece by Matt Asay with some useful background:

OpenAds is one of the most interesting open source projects/companies on the planet. Period. It's an open source ad server. Like Doubleclick without the lock-in or fees. In other words, open source. 100% GPLv2. I guess it should be no surprise that the world's most popular ad server, powering Web 2.0 business models, is open source, just as the LAMP stack is the technological basis for Web 2.0 sites/services.

Amazingly, OpenAds is British, too.

23 July 2007

Alfresco: Open Source Barometer

The enterprise content management company Alfesco has cropped up a few times on these pages. It's increasingly clear to me that it is one of the leaders of the second-generation open source companies that are starting to make their mark in the wider world of business software - not least because it employs the one-man open source powerhouse that is Matt Asay.

A further sign of Alfresco's importance in this sector is the appearance of its Open Source Barometer:

The Alfresco open source barometer is a survey, conducted April through June 2007, using opt-in data provided by 10,000 of the 15,000 Alfresco community members with the aim of providing a global survey of trends in the use of open source software in the enterprise.

Users were asked about their preferences in operating systems, application servers, databases, browsers, and portals to capture the latest information in how companies today evaluate and deploy open source and legacy proprietary software stacks in the enterprise.


The report is valuable, because it's based on a serious, if necessarily skewed, sample size. Two results stand out: that people increasingly are developing on Windows, and then deploying on GNU/Linux (something I'd noticed too), and that the UK lags behinds other countries as far as Alfresco's products are concerned:

The survey found that the U.S. is leading open source adoption globally. We believe the Global 2000 is seeking innovation and better value for their technology investments whereas in Europe open source adoption is often driven by governments seeking better value for their citizens. The research also showed that the U.K. lags behind in the adoption of open source suggesting less government emphasis compared with other European countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Apparently the survey will appear every six months, which is good news: tracking changes in its results should prove fascinating.

21 July 2007

In Your Face

Has everyone gone Facebook mad? It certainly seems so, and apparently I'm not the only one to think so. But whatever your views of Facebook now, it looks increasingly likely that it's going to be very big.

As I mentioned recently, the first sign that it had aspirations to being more than just another social network was when it opened up its platform. Now, it has underlined the platform aspect by purchasing Parakey.

Who? you might well say. Well, this might give you a hint of why it's an interesting move:

Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too. Friends and relatives—and hackers—do not have direct access to your computer; they’re just visiting a site that reflects only the portion of your stuff that you want them to be able to see.

Interested? You should be.

In explaining Parakey, Ross cuts to the chase. “We all know ­people…who have all this content that they are not publishing stored on their computers,” he says. “We’re trying to persuade them to live their lives online.”


"Live their lives online": well, that explains why Facebook bought the outfit. Among other things, Parakey will let Facebook users twiddle endlessly with their profiles even when they're offline.

Oh, and that "Ross" is Blake Ross, one of the moving forces behind Firefox. Parakey is based on Firefox technology, and will be (partly) open source. Assuming that Facebook keeps those parts open source (and it's hard to see how it could avoid doing so without rewriting the code from scratch), that means that Facebook could well become something of an ally for free software.

Well, I suppose that's a good reason to join the Facebook stampede.

19 July 2007

The (Open) Source of Red Hat's Success

Continuing his great series of interviews with key people in the world of business open source, Matt Asay (does this man never sleep?) talks to Matthew Szulik, CEO of Red Hat. I wrote a lot about Red Hat in the early days, but I've not followed it so closely recently (bad boy), so it was fascinating to get an update on what is arguably the most successful and most important open source company. In particular, I found this revealing:

In sum, our belief is that the best management is the peer process, just as in open source. If you measure up to your peers at Red Hat, you thrive. If you don't, you either change or self-select out. When you find people that can do things in an "honest way," without a mercenary view of their assignment, you win. A lot of people don't like this approach, and they leave.

In other words, the best way to run an open source company is to use the open source methodology. Imagine that.