This month's Harvard Business Review features a case study of a company debating whether to open source its software. Here's a mini review of the article.
While bored in an airport recently, I pored over the magazines at a newsstand and noticed that the new Harvard Business Review (April 2008) has an article on open source. Curious to know how the corporate types view open source, I got hold of the issue - at my local library rather than paying the Harvard-style $16 cover price - and read it. Here are my impressions.
The article, called "Open Source: Salvation or Suicide" by Scott Wilson and Ajit Kambil of Deloitte Research, is a fictional case study of company called KMS that makes an also fictional closed-source music device called Amp Up. Amp Up is a zany, button-filled modified guitar neck that connects to your computer and lets anyone make interesting music and sound. Interestingly the article tells the story through the eyes of a CEO who, at the time of writing, had never heard of open source. At first she is completely freaked out by it, but her pro-open-source brother helps her explore the pros and cons of opening up her product to an open-source development model.
http://www.linuxlinks.com/portal/news/article.php?story=20080501135106371