:47:00
In that one, you have
tight specification of objectives.
:47:04
Small project groups which are run
in a fairly hierarchical authoritarian manner.
:47:11
And you have long release intervals
:47:15
On the other hand,what I identified
is happening in the Linux world
:47:19
was a much more peer to peer decentralized,
market or bazaar-like style,
:47:26
which has a very short release intervals
:47:28
and constant solicitation of feedback from people
who are formally outside of the project.
:47:34
A very intense peer review process.
:47:39
And the startling thing was that the more I looked at this,
:47:42
the more it seemed that trading away
all the supposed advantages
:47:48
of conventional closed development,
:47:51
for that one single advantage
of massive independent peer review
:47:55
actually seemed to win,
actually seemed to get you good results.
:48:04
The reason Netscape is important is
:48:07
that they were the first large company
to participate in open source.
:48:13
We had Cygnus providing support,
:48:15
but we didn't really have much business.
:48:18
And Netscape went open source essentially
as a way to fight Microsoft,
:48:22
which was giving away Internet Explorer,
:48:27
but not letting anyone else have the source code,
not letting companies collaborate.
:48:33
Working as part of the sales force, I got a bit of,
:48:35
I got a good idea of.. of why people bought our software
:48:38
and what it took to make our software successful
in the marketplace against competitive products.
:48:44
However, the problem was,
:48:46
we were seeing, as that, as time went on,
:48:50
our software was uh,
:48:54
being competed against by other
people's software, particularly Microsoft's
:48:59
and as time went on, the price of our software had to drop