Last week, during my flight to Paris, I finally had the chance to read Simon Phipps’ book entitled Open Source Strategies for the Enterprise.
Buy it. Great value at zero price!
I read it quite fast because I already knew its main contents: in fact, the book is a rational selection of Simon’s posts that you can find in the wild webmink blog. Nothing new to me, considering that I generally agree on many of Simon’s assertions.
In particular, I love the following :
- identification of different layers of community, pointing out that a community is not an “indistinct term”
- insight into the relations acting inside communities and the synchronization of interest of many parties as the driving force of a community
- reflection on “where values come from open source” and his final word on the open core business model
- final conclusion: “your best community collaboration strategy is to trade control for influence”.
It’s a nice and interesting reading for new open source adopters and for those who want to understand the open source internal and external dynamics.
I recommend you this reading!