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If the MBA's were looking for a system to commoditize the nerds, they could not have come up with a better system than open source. A nerd writes an scalable,

If the MBA's were looking for a system to commoditize the nerds, they could not have come up with a better system than open source. A nerd writes an scalable, robust, communication library and makes it open source. Do the big bucks go to the nerd? The one time popular kid in high school, pays a college student to wrap it in a chat app and becomes a billionaire. Nerds write a database. The database is opensource so they get a pittance. The business people put the database behind a web service and make billions. Nerds write a full text search engine. Do they get rich? No, but the business people sell it as a SAAS and get rich. The nerds reward: They get to work as drones for the business people, who will lay claim to all their efforts both inside and outside the company. I cannot see our current open source environment lasting 20 years. Relying on support is going to be more and more of a problem. What scenario do you think will make the Fortune 500 CEO happy: a) You bought support for open source product X from small company YZ which developed and open sourced X but which no body has heard of, or b) that you bought a support contract from fellow Fortune 500 company C which everybody has heard of, but does not contribute any upstream changes to X?

strenholme 8y ago
“who will lay claim to all their efforts both inside and outside the company” Ah, yes, the infamous “inventions” clause which pretty much any and all developers need to sign to get a job. Here in California, we have a key exception encoded in law: Anything I do on my own time, with my own gear, not related to my day job is something I can release as open source code. And there are starting to be companies with “open source Fridays” out there who can and do let people openly work on open source while on the clock.

strenholme 8y ago

“who will lay claim to all their efforts both inside and outside the company” Ah, yes, the infamous “inventions” clause which pretty much any and all developers need to sign to get a job. Here in California, we have a key exception encoded in law: Anything I do on my own time, with my own gear, not related to my day job is something I can release as open source code. And there are starting to be companies with “open source Fridays” out there who can and do let people openly work on open source while on the clock.