InfoWorld: Build vs. Buy

Victorian Marriage and Open Source

"VCs ply project leads with promises of enterprise glory and IPO wealth. Corporations try to lure developers with the promise of temporal comfort--a comfy salary and expanded influence.

"Maybe this is a good thing. I'm certainly a fan of commercial open source, as I believe that the more money developers can make from open source development, the more of such development there will be. But I wonder if the 'marital offer' corporations and capital makes to the development community is sometimes a bit crass and, well, material..."

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Building vs. Buying Open Source Communities

"Leaving aside the question as to whether one actually can buy community (see my separate post), I don't believe it's an easy task under the best of circumstances, for the same reason that most acquisitions fail to deliver their promised benefits. Combining corporate/community cultures is tremendously difficult. Combining the business models these entail is only slightly less so.

"I'm an Arsenal supporter. I despise Chelsea. Part of the reason I dislike Chelsea is that it's clearly a 'buy community' kind of soccer (football) club. I think the Russian mafia (ahem, Roman Abromovich) has injected nearly $500 million into the club, buying up an immensely deep bench of talented players..."

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Related Stories:

• SearchOpenSource: Will Proprietary Vendors' Open Source Deals Help IT shops, OS Movement?(Dec 15, 2005)
• Editor's Note: What Is Easy and What is Right(Dec 02, 2005)
• Editor's Note: Putting Away the Welcome Mat(Nov 18, 2005)
• Computerworld Australia: The Database the Open Source Community Won't Build(Nov 18, 2005)