My Opensource Beer Dream

What do dreams tell you? 

Either I am stressed at work or this dream really has some deep meaning that I cannot fathom, but honestly here is my dream from last night!

I had two bottles of beer, both looked really similar -- one was labeled and the other had no label. In discussing the beers around the camp fire, the unlabeled beer was "opensource beer" the other was "Mark's Beer" What was the difference? Well both beers had used the same recipe but my beer was better tasting! (Hey this is my dream OK!) In discussing it around this camp fire we all agreed that mine was better, and the reason for it was simple, although both beers used the same recipe it was the craftsman (Me in my dream) that used their expertise to craft a better tasting beer.

When I woke up, I was thinking whether this insight was correct?

• Selling products based on opensource projects only makes sense if you add some value over and above the base project (in the dream example the ingredients didn't change, just probably how I processed the ingredients)
  
• Even though there was one recipe there are many derivatives possible based on how we all interpret the recipe

Then I started wondering whether this dream analogy really had legs?

• Wouldn't we all band together and add our process pieces into the opensource arena so we could all derive benefit? Maybe, but RedHat, Ubuntu, et. al. don't seem to do that...

OK, I for one, have no idea, so I thought I would share this dream with you all and see if any dream readers out there could enlighten me, on what my dream really means!

-Mark

Posted at 09:22AM Dec 07, 2007 by Mark Herring in OpenOffice  |  Comments[1]  |  | |