Innovation Happens Elsewhere

Free online book “Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy” is intended for anyone considering using Open Source. It describes what open source is, discusses business reasons for using open source, and describes how an open source project works in a day-to-day manner.

Book Description

This book contains not only the lessons we have learned from helping to create and nurture communities around these Sun-sponsored and other open source and community development projects, but the fruit of years of participation in innovative communities of many sorts. Specifically, one of us2 was the originator of the Common Lisp Group, which is the first, large-scale, email-based design effort; this group worked from 1981 until the early 1990s. The same author2 founded Lucid, Inc, one of whose products–designed and implemented in the late 1980s–used a suite of free-software tools tied together by a proprietary, database-centered coordination layer. The tools included GCC, GDB, and a window-based version of Emacs originally called Lucid Emacs and now called Xemacs. The interaction of the suite of tools with the coordination layer was through an open set of protocols, and several compilers were modified to support these protocols. Lucid was one of the first companies to do significant work on open-source code (in this case, Free Software Foundation code) as part of a business strategy, and in fact, the existence of LGPL is partly due to this early commercial use of GPLed code.

This book also includes insights from studying other open-source projects such as Linux, Apache, Emacs, Xemacs, GCC, GDB, and Mozilla.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Innovation Happens Elsewhere
• What Is Open Source?
• Why Consider Open Source?
• Licenses
• How To Do Open-Source Development
• Going with Open Source
• How To Build Momentum
• What To Avoid–Known Problems and Failures
• Closing Thoughts

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