Open Source Victory

Image via CrunchBase

There was a time when open source felt like a crusade. It was considered rebellious. Microsoft talked it down. Now the biggest corporations depend on open source to do cutting edge work. Open source is like this big ocean you fish in.

Open source won

open source is now mainstream and a new norm .... After more than a decade of the low-cost, lean startup culture successfully developing on open source tools, it’s clearly a legitimate, mainstream option for technology tools and innovation. ..... large organizations are actively adopting many of the open source technologies we track, e.g., web development frameworks, programming languages, content management, data management and analysis tools .... MySQL appears as popular as ever and remains open source after three years of Oracle control and Microsoft is pushing open source JavaScript as a key part of its web development environment and more explicit support for other open source languages. Oracle and Microsoft are not likely to radically change their business models, but their recent efforts show that open source can work in many business contexts. ..... open source permeates most interactions on the web. ..... the collaborative, sharing culture that permeates the open source community spreads to the enterprise and government with the same impact on innovation and productivity.

You have to ask, what drives and sustains the open source contributors? A lot of people toil on open source projects with no monetary return in sight or mind. I think they are responding to a basic creative urge.

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Does Google Have An Innovation Problem?

Image via Wikipedia

Robert Scoble: Why Google can’t build Instagram: (I was working at Microsoft as Flickr got bought by Yahoo, Skype got bought by eBay, etc etc). ..... Google, internally, knows it has an innovation problem .... is looking to remake its culture internally to help entrepreneurial projects take hold...... how Larry Ellison actually got efficiencies from teams. If a team wasn’t productive, he’d come every couple of weeks and say “let me help you out.” What did he do? He took away another person until the team started shipping and stopped having unproductive meetings. .... At Google you can’t use MySQL and Ruby on Rails .... Google Wave failed, in part, because it couldn’t keep up with the first wave of users and got horribly slow .... Small teams rule

Google is going to fail in the innovation department if it feels like it has to be number one in every emerging trend. On the other hand, it could keep going into new sectors of the economy like it has shown a tendency to do. Google can't beat Facebook on social, but it can beat Facebook and every other web company on wind farms and clean cars.

Vin Vacanti On That Techie Cofounder

Image via CrunchBaseVin Vacanti of Yipit, one of the hottest tech startups in New York City - not long back the not so hot, not so funded, but always promising tech startup - has produced a series of rather insightful blog posts on a topic that I have seen more early stage entrepreneurs in town struggle with than probably any other. The search for that techie cofounder beats the search for funding.