Recently, Nicholas Carr, an acclaimed writer and ex-editor of Harvard Business Review, wrote an article titled The Ignorance of the Crowds in the Strategy+Business Magazine (free registration required). In the article, he tries to portray open source as a hybrid Bazaar-Cathedral model and warns the businesses against any reliance on the open source process to drive innovation. I follow Carr’s writings regularly (through his blog and other media outlets). I have great respect for his work. But he has got this one totally wrong. In this post, I am going to take his arguments and show how he has got it totally wrong. Since Mr. Carr is an influential writer, I feel that he should have avoided the stereotypes and misunderstandings about the open source process. I just hope that he sees this post, as a response to his article, and considers my arguments for its merit.
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