open source

For a time, "economies of scale" meant that the key to success was making a business bigger, and focusing on nothing more than profit. Sell more products however you could, and cut costs as much as possible. This is no longer the case. We're entering a time when smaller businesses that solve real problems can be profitable, and the former behemoths are becoming dinosaurs.

The past

The assembly line was the key innovation of the auto industry, that famous invention of Henry Ford.

The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS) has a great segment dissecting the criticisms/wild flames put forth on a series of shows on the TWIT network. Wanted to add a couple comments missing from their discussion.

First of all, the Mac Break Weekly show apparently spends some time bashing the open source community, calling out Drupal, and how difficult it is to solve "simple" problems like uploading images for blog posts.

I started writing a response to a discussion in the latest "Linux Link Tech Show" episode, but ended up with something far too long, so I've split it up into 4 posts. The next post is about the TLLTS vs TWIT debate, and introduces this set of post.

In my early Linux system administration days, when I was first trying to set up a mail server with spam filtering, I ran across a really puzzling bug in Dspam, the software I was trying to get working. While all the other users of the software were getting great results, with Dspam catching 99%+ of all their spam, it was only catching about 70% of my spam after quite a bit of training.

I posted my results, and confusion, to the Dspam mailing list. The original developer of this software (which has thousands of users), Jonathan Zdziarski, responded that that did not sound right.

What's extraordinary about the open source community is that this level of support happens all the time, every day, without charge, in hundreds, thousands of projects out there. People that can get to the bottom of a problem and fix it at the source, not just provide a workaround, are directly reachable and motivated to see their software work as well as possible. They're not hidden away from the public behind a large corporation, unreachable with layers of clueless support script readers stuffed between you and them.

Some handy tips for users of OpenOffice.org, looking to get away from the mouse...

Ten fantastic keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice.org

LugRadio has a very interesting discussion in their current podcast about the role of a community manager, in creating a vibrant community around an open source project. They came to the conclusion that each project needs a leader that people trust to take the project in the right direction, someone to be a diplomat to resolve issues among people in the community and keep everyone rowing in the same direction, and a strong technical lead to solve the hard problems.

This sounds quite similar to the challenges a small business faces.