[Discuss] discuss Digest, Vol 9, Issue 29

[Cameron Adamez]

On Feb 28, 2013, at 2:39 PM, Matt Maier <blueback09 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Individuals can try to coerce and encourage businesses to be as open as possible, but at the end of the day their priorities are fundamentally different.
> […]
> It would be a reasonable tradeoff. A business wouldn't get the prestige and street-cred of being "fully open" but on the other hand individuals are notoriously bad about making their "truly open" project truly useful. Businesses are invested in writing and maintaining documentation, and a forum, and support so that they can grow a community. Individuals tend to get bored and wander off to do other things. So if the community can agree to not stigmatize "less than totally open" they get the benefit of companies that are mostly open and stick around.

Incidentally, a good case study for this is the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox OS. I have heard that in their day to day operations they have slowly nudged a vendor from being completely locked down to slightly open because of development work that had to happen.