7 lessons from Mozilla

Link:
Article in The Open Road.

Two noteworthy lessons - more in the article:

1.
Superior products matter. Apache, Firefox, WordPress, Wikipedia, etc. What's the common theme? "All are known for being best-in-class for users." If the code is weak, the project will be weak. Period. Open source is an accelerant: it either makes poor code die faster or great code thrive faster.

6.
Communities are not markets: members are citizens. It's therefore important to treat them like active, valuable participants in open source, not consumers thereof because, as Lilly notes, such citizens "don't just make products better. They make them what they are."

Maybe an example of the first lesson is seen in another article in The Open Road:

Firefox, Google's Chrome speed past IE, Opera

where they tested the speed of the various browser as measured by the industry-standard SunSpider JavaScript test.

Deutsche Telekom spawns of cloud company

Deutsche Telekom spawns cloud vendor Zimory

From the page:

Part distribution strategy, part software development strategy (Zimory uses an array of third-party open-source code to build its service), open source is fundamental to Zimory. However, the model's magic is in connecting disparate computing needs and resources, which is a "proprietary" service that only Zimory will be able to manage through its cloud infrastructure. It's a very smart idea.

Even Microsoft agrees. It named Zimory to its select German incubator program.

SaaS and open Source

Here is a comment about SaaS and Open Source:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10132369-16.html

Mainly: Customers are sceptical to lock-in and the answer is Open Source!

- Else