Open Source Software Example: "HP to Open-Source Its WebOS Mobile Platform"
3 comments Posted by kkautza at 9:25 AM
Google recently launched a new television platform (Google TV) that will replace channel surfing with Google searching. Google TV allows users to search their available television programs and the web at the same time. There are currently three ways to buy Google TV. Sony has come out with an internet TV and an internet Blu-ray player. The third way, and my favorite is The Logitech Revue. The Revue has a full keyboard equipped with a mouse pad.
After completing the open-source case on Linux last week, I discovered this article which features an interview with Dries Buytaert, the founder of the open-source software project, Drupal. The volunteer project has grown immensely since its beginnings in 2000 and is used by big names such as The White House, Harvard, and MTV.
Here's a really cool example (www.hitrecord.org) of open source innovation in the entertainment industry. It brings together artists of all kinds: actors, graphic artists, musicians, writers, composers, etc. This is just more proof that open source isn't just for software... it can be applied to anything! Check out a video below explaining the process and check out the website.
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/4834.html
I came across this article and thought that it would be extremely helpful for those people who are writing their Case Report about the Linux case. It's very relevant to our course material for this week.
Basically, the article highlights the benefits of both Microsoft and Linux-type software. The authors conclude that it is unlikely that one of the systems will force the other one out. However, they explore the different situations that could arise that could potentially make this happen.
Parts of the article get a little detailed and hard to follow, but for the most part it is very informative. The most interesting part to me was the section that discusses how Microsoft could benefit from piracy when that piracy is from people who would not buy Microsoft to begin with. This is because Microsoft is not losing sales to them, yet they are still increasing the value of the system and moving users away from Linux.
Anyway, hope you enjoy because I did!
The creative ability of a collection of distant and disaggregated individuals is clearly evident across a number of open-source offerings, including Linux, Mozilla Firefox, and Wikipedia, among others. In recent years, the power of co-creation has been harnessed by a number of corporations, including Ducati, General Mills, and Procter & Gamble and is being widely advocated by a number of recent business tomes, including Democratizing Innovation, Outside Innovation, and The New Age of Innovation. Clearly, customer co-creation is a hot topic and one that will likely attract increasing interest in the near future. Given its recency and the exhuberence expressed by its proponents, it is difficult to decipher the limits of this new innovation technique. Are there any realms where co-creation can't work or shouldn't be applied?
An initial look into the limits of co-creation is provided by Penguin Publishing's recently failed wiki-experiment, A Million Penguins. Essentially, Penguin experimented with the idea of co-creating a novel by applying the logic, principles, and techniques of open-source software. Penguin launched this initiative on its corporate website in early February 2007 and shut it down (due to the overwhelming volume of contributions) approximately one month later. During this brief period, nearly 1,500 authors contributed approximately 11,000 edits. Thus, from a contribution standpoint, this experiment might be considered a success. However, The finished product is a collection of 1,030 pages of chaotic and inchoate prose laden with disjointed paragraphs and a direction-less plot. Those interested in exploring what when wrong (as well as right) should check out both the brief post-mortem provided in Penguin's blog as well as a recent academic investigation of this experiment by Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas of the Institute for Creative Technologies at De Montfort University (UK). Both reports identify a number of problems with this experiment, including creative divergence among its contributors, the technological limits of the wiki-platform, and vandalism, among others. If nothing else, Penguin's experiment presents the co-creation movement with a bit of irony: Although we can write books about co-creation, co-creating a book seems beyond our limits.
