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Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy
Posted: June 13th, 2008, 12:40pm CEST

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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 business by building a creative community that reaches beyond the barriers of the business. The key is developing a web-driven community where new types of collaboration and creativity can flourish. Since 1998 Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel have been helping groups at Sun Microsystems understand open source and advising them on how to build successful communities around open source projects. In this book the authors present lessons learned from their own experiences with open source, as well as those from other well-known projects such as Linux, Apache, and Mozilla.

Features

*Describes how open source development works and offers persuasive reasons for using it to help achieve business goals.
*Shows how to use open source in day-to-day work, discusses the various licenses in use, and describes what makes for a successful project.
*Written in an engaging style for executives, managers, and engineers that addresses the human and business issues involved in open source development as well as its history, philosophy, and future.

About the Author

Ron Goldman is a researcher at Sun Microsystems Laboratories in California working on alternative software development methodologies and new software architectures inspired by biology. He has been working with open source since hacking on GDB at Lucid, Inc. back in 1992. Since 1998 he has been helping groups at Sun Microsystems understand open source and advising them on how to build successful communities around their open source projects.

Richard P. Gabriel received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981, and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in 1998. He has been a researcher at Stanford University, company president and Chief Technical Officer at Lucid, Inc., vice president of Development at ParcPlace-Digitalk, a management consultant for several startups and Sun Microsystems, and Consulting Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.