Random footnotes of Engineering

What is the challenge of Open Source? I keep on hearing from different places and over different times about are we giving away the "Crown Jewels". Similarly are we arming our competitors to compete with us more effectively? What I'd like to do is to lay out the challenge of Open Source to the developers and to the market place.

For me the challenge of Open Source is one of innovation. Essentially we are challenging ourselves to out innovate the competition. It is not about sitting on a pile of patents and saying we'll sue you or keeping everything hidden in the hope that people won't see how incredibly trivial the 'technology' we sell is. I see Open Source as making a bet on us. We need to come up with the ideas and the technology to make us successful.

A big part of this is execution. The time from idea to product needs to be very short so that we can be dynamic and attack the market in an efficient fashion. If the idea is out there and someone can more efficiently come to market it can certainly be a problem for this model.

For me this is a bet I want to make. I want to challenge myself to be able to outthink and outperform the competition. It doesn't meant that I'll always be able to do it ;-)