Very true, revdiablo. In fact, in my other (private-sector) incarnations, I utilize open-source exclusively. Likewise, Sandia people contribute back to outside open source projects, as they come more and more to realize (as Apple did) that there's a tremendous upside to leveraging worldwide open source developments that far outweighs the small downside of not keeping product-development payware companies afloat.

Sandia's in a fairly unique position because of its responsibility as a keeper of Very Important Technologies for the American people. In some ways that drives us towards control of the source code; in some ways it prevents us from using some of the benefits of worldwide development and resources. I personally am not a Sandia employee; a private company controls my contract but my Sandia tasking is totally open-source-focused.

In fact, I just used the power of open source development to squeeze a payware company into giving me their source code. {Yes, we're paying for it.} They realized that it might be the last $$$ they ever get from us because we're happily obsoleting them with our own internal developments and open source libraries found on the Net {through Perl Monks, no less!}, but they started by only offering a usage-limited compiled binary on a single node-locked workstation for not a lot less money than we ended up with.

IMHO, any software company that doesn't think through their software strategy WRT open source and make some strategic decisions is going to become road kill in the very near future. ESR and others have catalogued Microsoft's panicked reactions, but that applies across the board to both companies and guys who expect to make bread as employees writing software.

In reply to Re^4: Teams, Personalities, and Getting the Job Done by samizdat
in thread Teams, Personalities, and Getting the Job Done by samizdat

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