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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Michael Calore writes on Wired about the new effort by FSF to promote Ogg format

In an effort to rally support for the underdog media format, the Free Software Foundation has launched PlayOgg.org, a website promoting awareness of the Ogg format. It’s an educational primer for playing Ogg Vorbis audio files and Ogg Theora video files on Mac and Windows desktops. (more…)

Recently Dana Blankenhorn wrote on ZDNet blog titled Open Source is bad for vendors. In the post, he said the following

Many of these vendor fears are wrapped up in the phrase “intellectual property.” What you do for me becomes my property.
But why should it? Why should you, as an employer, continue to profit from the work I perform as your employee? Why should you, as a vendor, continue to control the machine I bought from you? (more…)