Open, but not as usual
The Economist have a very interesting article on Open Source, talking about different aspect of Open source model from contributions, to business model, ... etc. The article pointed to some graphics from the Apache Software foundation about Open Sourcing in the Apache community and I was impressed to see the increase of discussions holders compared to code writers, I really would prefer seeing the opposite which is impossible but at least something more reasonable.
EVERY time internet users search on Google, shop at Amazon or trade on eBay, they rely on open-source software—products that are often built by volunteers and cost nothing to use. More than two-thirds of websites are hosted using Apache, an open-source product that trounces commercial rivals. Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia with around 2.6m entries in more than 120 languages, gets more visitors each day than the New York Times's site, yet is created entirely by the public. There is even an open-source initiative to develop drugs to treat diseases in poor countries.
The article pointed also to projects such MySQL which is a very interesting Open Source business model, MySQL which is used by many giants such Google and Yahoo to serve huge database. Models like Wikipedia are very interesting to study also, specially that the number of contributors is increasing in the same time with the number of articles published.
I stopped also at the Toyota experience which organised its teams in ways that stress the same sort of decentralisation, flexibility and autonomy that exist in the Linux community, according to Philip Evans and Bob Wolf of the Boston Consulting Group in an article in the Harvard Business Review last July. Interesting to see models adopted by big companies in their business to profit from the successful experience in Open Source.
