On Novell's acquisition of SUSE

On Novell's acquisition of SUSE

Posted Nov 4, 2003 22:41 UTC (Tue) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216)
In reply to: On Novell's acquisition of SUSE by marduk
Parent article: On Novell's acquisition of SUSE

I am beginning to think that corporations by definition cannot own a Free software project without changing its fundamental character and cooling its momentum (what some might call "screwing it up"). :-) It all comes down to the different motivation the corporation has (again, by definition, not because of any nefarious plot within any given corporation) to make "products". The strength of a community project is that it is amorphous--its edges are ill-defined, and this allows people to help change and improve it through the discussion/flamewar/incremental process :-) whereas a corporation needs to have a well-defined entity that has sharp edges, so they can say, 'this is Our Product v28.0, please buy it from us'. Customers want to know what they're buying. Community members are more flexible, since there's no money changing hands and so what is Mine and what is Yours (the boundary line) doesn't matter so much.

The problem is, sealing down the edges to make a Product tends to quiet down the (dare we say it?) "innovation" at the edges and the project tends to start to calcify. It seems to take a really charismatic and very clued-in corporation to keep the momentum going the way it does naturally in a community project.

Anyway, just my observations/blathering. Feel free to ignore...

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