Why would Google, for its part, openly publish details of its MapReduce apparatus and the Google filesystem, which Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella would later use to create Hadoop? Because one of the biggest challenges to software organizations is hiring. In a world in which Google had kept details of MapReduce and the Google filesystem private, it would be impossible for them to assess these skills in external candidates. Worse, each new hire would have to be exposed (link)
There might be 500 startups right now who think they’re making something Microsoft might buy. Even Microsoft probably couldn’t manage 500 development projects in-house.— Paul Graham (link)
The weight of evidence for an extraordinary claim must be proportioned to its strangeness.— Marquis de Laplace (link)
As the availability of source code and services has democratized access to technology and irrevocably altered traditional procurement processes, developers have increasingly become technology kingmakers (link)
You can no longer win with a closed-source platform, and you can’t build a successful standalone company purely on open source (link)
Unlike so-called permissive licenses such as Apache, BSD, or MIT, the GPL and other similar “copyleft” licenses require that any changes, modifications, or additions to a given codebase be made available under exactly the same terms (link)
Vikram: [Copy-left - if i make a change, I'll have to open source it. If I don't want to open source my change, I'll have to pay the owner of the software ]
Rather than comply, then, buyers can purchase an alternate, hence the “dual,” license for the product, which allows them to keep their code private without requiring anything in turn. (link)
The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
— Albert Einstein (link)
This is the Software Paradox: the most powerful disruptor we have ever seen and the creator of multibillion-dollar net new markets is being commercially devalued, daily. (link)
Those companies that have market permission to invest in the necessary operational scale at present have an important advantage over those that are slaves to quarterly results, because sacrificing profit now for opportunity later may hold big dividends as the market for software as a standalone entity continues to decline. (link)
Growth aside, however, it’s difficult to imagine the company achieving its $3+ billion valuation without the October 2011 addition of OnDemand. (link)
Most famously, Atlassian doesn’t employ sales people. (link)
It was such an obvious counterpoint that “everything short of Photoshop” became a cliché among industry watchers discussing the ascent of the browser-based software delivery model (link)