Giving your core product away is certainly an unusual business strategy, yet some succesful software companies are doing exactly that

If you went to your bank manager and said you had a great idea for a business in which you gave away your core product to your competitors, it is likely you would be instantly shown the door and not just because of the credit crunch. Yet this is exactly what some of the most successful companies in the world are doing.

Red Hat, the company which spearheads the development of the Linux operating system, generated revenues of half a billion dollars in the 2008 financial year, the vast proportion of which was profit, while IT company, Sun Microsystems, spent $1 billion in February 2008 to acquire database provider, MySQL.

The common thread is that both Linux and MySQL are open source systems. So what is open source?

The core concept is that software developed in this way can be freely redistributed by others. Open source also guarantees open access to the software’s source code, the lines of programming that make up the application, to enable others to develop and improve it.

This may sound as though the evolution of open source software is a free-for-all, but the truth is far from it. The development of open source technology is usually overseen by some form of governing organisation, which determines the general direction the development takes and which improvements are included in new versions.

This organisation can take the form of a broad community of developers and users, as is the case with the Apache web server, or a dominant single company taking input from other companies and individuals, such as MySQL.

Martin Michlmayr, a former project leader for Debian, an open source operating system, argues: “Open source is not a lawless frontier at all. There are clear license terms that have to be followed, even though open source generally offers more freedoms than proprietary software. It’s true, that many organisations are still struggling to understand open source and its license terms. That’s why Hewlett Packard, together with other partners, started a open source governance community, FOSSBazaar, to share best practices.”

While the open source concept may seem unusual in a business sense, it is far from new, with Red Hat arguing that scientists and mathematicians have shared their discoveries with each other for centuries with the goal of pushing forward the entire pool of knowledge.

It is this culture of openness and transparency that open source supporters say enables applications to be developed far more quickly and at a lower cost than proprietary alternatives. Also, as open source software is freely redistributed, this can lead to a rapid uptake among a user base. Take, for example, the speed at which open source web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox and Google’s Chrome have been eating into Microsoft Internet Explorer’s domination of the sector.

However, it is not just individuals who are downloading and using open source software, businesses are embracing open source too. LinkedIn, the professional social networking website, started using MySQL to handle its database of more than 30 million people around the world last year. At the time, the company’s chief technology officer, Jean-Luc Vaillant, said that the “open and reliable environment” it provides saves the company both “time and money”.

According to John Newton, chief technology officer and co-founder of Alfresco, a provider of open source content management systems used by organisations as diverse as Islington Borough Council, the French Air Force and games maker Electronic Arts, the company’s software has been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. “It is probably the most widely used content management system from an open source perspective. We built the product, people try it and they may pay for it but they may not,” he says.

The company makes its money through providing around 1,000 enterprises with technical support, training or consulting services to develop their own applications using Alfresco as a platform.

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An open source to a brighter future? – Times Online.

It was the “aha!” moment that Stephanie Rosalia was hoping for.

A group of fifth graders huddled around laptop computers in the school library overseen by Ms. Rosalia and scanned allaboutexplorers.com, a Web site that, unbeknownst to the children, was intentionally peppered with false facts.

Ms. Rosalia, the school librarian at Public School 225, a combined elementary and middle school in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, urged caution. “Don’t answer your questions with the first piece of information that you find,” she warned.

Most of the students ignored her, as she knew they would. But Nozimakon Omonullaeva, 11, noticed something odd on a page about Christopher Columbus.

“It says the Indians enjoyed the cellphones and computers brought by Columbus!” Nozimakon exclaimed, pointing at the screen. “That’s wrong.”

It was an essential discovery in a lesson about the reliability — or lack thereof — of information on the Internet, one of many Ms. Rosalia teaches in her role as a new kind of school librarian.

Ms. Rosalia, 54, is part of a growing cadre of 21st-century multimedia specialists who help guide students through the digital ocean of information that confronts them on a daily basis. These new librarians believe that literacy includes, but also exceeds, books. Complete  Article  Availaible at…

The Future of Reading – In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update – Series – NYTimes.com.

Miep Gies kept Anne Frank’s diary safe before its publication The last surviving member of the small group who helped hide the Dutch Jewish girl Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis has turned 100 years old. Miep Gies will celebrate her birthday on Sunday quietly with relatives and friends, she said this week. She said she was not deserving of the attention, and that others had done far more to protect the Netherlands’ Jews. She paid tribute to “unnamed heroes”, picking out her husband Jan for his courageous defiance of the Nazis. “He was a resistance man who said nothing but did a lot. During the war he refused to say anything about his work, only that he might not come back one night. People like him existed in thousands but were never heard,” Miep Gies said in an email to the Associated Press this week. Accolades Mrs Gies was an employee of Anne Frank’s father, Otto, who kept them and six others supplied during their two years in hiding in an attic in Amsterdam from 1942 to 1944. But the family were found by the authorities, and deported. Gies, bottom left, and Otto Frank, next to her, were reunited after the war Anne Frank died of typhus in the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen later. It was Mrs Gies who collected up Anne Frank’s papers, and locked them away, hoping that one day she would be able to give them back to the girl. In the event, she returned them to Otto Frank, and helped him compile them into a diary that was published in 1947. It went on to sell tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages. She became a kind of ambassador for the diary, travelling to talk about Anne Frank and her experiences, campaigning against Holocaust-denial and refuting allegations that the diary was a forgery. For her efforts to protect the Franks and to preserve their memory, Mrs Gies won many accolades. “This is very unfair,” she told the Associated Press. “So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work.”

BBC NEWS | Europe | Anne Frank guardian reaches 100.

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