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February 19, 2006

An Open Source fable

One day a CIO going to the cubical of his head-programmer found that he was using his spare time to work on an Open Source project. The CIO was angry at first because the lead-programmer and other programmers were wasting their time in some community and hacking at code that everyone could see. The CIO thought the programmers were playing a trick on him by working on this free software. But the CIO invited the head-programmer into his office to explain what he was doing. And after a while, the CIO discovered to his delight that the company could profit from using that particular Open Source project. To gain more profit, the CIO told the head-programmer and colleagues to stop working on the Open Source projects themselves and to use all their time to find other Open Source projects the company could profit from by using. The head-programmer spent all his time searching for the right projects and his colleagues spent all their time integrating them into the corporate IT environment. The CIO profited from the reduced costs, faster development and more flexible integration and was very happy. As the CIO profited, he grew greedy and thinking he could profit even more - fired all his programmers and went to the community himself to get them to do all his work for him. And was met with silence.

(Sorry Aesop)

Posted by Matthew at February 19, 2006 06:03 PM

Comments

Sounds ominuous. Is it? ;)

Posted by: Steven Noels at February 19, 2006 08:32 PM

It's more a jet-lagged reflection on the growing commercial "interest" in Open Source seen at the "Open Source meets business" and OSBC conferences. And in particular what happens when you build your business on Open Source without committing to the projects and communities.

Posted by: Matthew at February 19, 2006 09:00 PM

I've definitely had bosses in the past who would have taken that route.

Currently the only pain is that my interest doesn't match 100% what the customers want my interest to be. So, for example, I spend more of my day following the Struts and Axis communities than Jakarta Commons.

It's a nice issue to have though :)

Posted by: Henri Yandell at February 22, 2006 11:36 PM