I’ve always claimed that I have learnt far more from my involvement with open source than through many years of education, employed work, contracting and continuing education. Open source exposes me to people from a much wider domain and skill set than any other aspect of my life.
In a recent interview Bob Sutor, IBM’s Vice President of Open Source and Standards made a similar observation about IBM and their involvement with open source:
It taught us how to better collaborate with others who don’t work for IBM; it demonstrated that business models can evolve; it showed us that a good intellectual property strategy balances both “open” and “closed”; and it taught us that software that grew up in a non-corporate setting can be excellent, wildly successful, and meet customer needs. Linux, along with other open source software and open standards, showed us that being flexible in our thinking and business models is lower risk than adamantly clinging to past practices that might have worked once but now aren’t solely what customers really need.
So, it’s not just individuals like you and I that can learn from open source, it’s also huge organisations like IBM.
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