Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy [Hardcover]

Ron Goldman (Author), Richard P. Gabriel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 25, 2005

It's a plain fact: regardless of how smart, creative, and innovative your organization is, there are more smart, creative, and innovative people outside your organization than inside. Open source offers the possibility of bringing more innovation into your business by building a creative community that reaches beyond the barriers of the business. The key is developing a web-driven community where new types of collaboration and creativity can flourish. Since 1998 Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel have been helping groups at Sun Microsystems understand open source and advising them on how to build successful communities around open source projects. In this book the authors present lessons learned from their own experiences with open source, as well as those from other well-known projects such as Linux, Apache, and Mozilla.

* Winner of 2006 Jolt Productivity Award for General Books
* Describes how open source development works and offers persuasive reasons for using it to help achieve business goals.
* Shows how to use open source in day-to-day work, discusses the various licenses in use, and describes what makes for a successful project.
* Written in an engaging style for executives, managers, and engineers that addresses the human and business issues involved in open source development as well as its history, philosophy, and future

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Innovation Happens Elsewhere is at least as important for those who have no interest in software as those who do, because in the details of the history and practice of the open source community lie clues to the institutional adaptations of the information economy; in the clauses of the various software licenses lie the case law that will come to define property in the information age. There are other books that have a great deal to say about this evolution, but none combines the personal experience and inside-out insight to be gained from the engagement of Ron Goldman and Richard Gabriel in so many flesh-and-blood open source projects and the development of the structures that have supported them."—from the foreword by Chris Meyer, Monitor Group

Book Description

How to develop software with open source techiques—from renowned engineers

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 424 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann; 1 edition (April 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558608893
• ISBN-13: 978-1558608894
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,286,389 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars online version, December 12, 2005

By 

I. Maclean (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy (Hardcover)

The authoors have made this book available for reading online under a creative commons license at:
http://dreamsongs.com/IHE/IHE.html
This is very generous of the authors and thankfully is happening more and more with FOSS related books. - see Karl Fogels "Producing Open source" or Lessigs "Free Culture".

By all means buy the hardcopy if you like the online version. Personally I'm more likely to want to support an author who is good enough to make the material available online.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars sometimes look outside your company, August 3, 2005

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy (Hardcover)

The authors explain how open source can be compatible with a company that develops its own proprietary software. A key point of the book is that going with open source can be a very pragmatic decision about speeding up product development. Because no matter how innovative your people are, the chances are high that due to sheer numbers of other people, you can use open source code developed by the latter.

One does not have to buy into the entire open source mindset to acknowledge that there is merit in accessing external code that is useful. If for no other reason than that your competitors might already be doing so. Reimplementing an open source application takes time to write and debug. So sometimes, look outside your company.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Guide to the Value Created by Free/Open Source Software, January 27, 2007

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy (Hardcover)

This is not the book I was expecting, but that's my fault. I was expecting something beyond "The Innovator's Dilemma" focused on management. What I ended up with was in fact much more useful, an elementary but essential and easy to read guide to Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS).

This book is a real gem, and for any manager thinking about how to explode out of their tired old proprietary software architecture, joins "Wikinomics" and "Infotopia" as essential reading.

This book is well-structured, comes with credible and extensive references and appendices, and also offers an online version for preview or later quick search at [ ...w.]dreamsongs.com/IHE.

I'm still waiting for Sun and RedHat to create a skunkworks where we can quickly test-drive and adapt open source softwares addressing each of the 18 functionalities that the Central Intelligence Agency has known it needed since 1986 but still does not have precisely because the CIA is the anti-thesis of open source (see image I have added above).

Earth Intelligence Network is going to put CIA out of business--it will be based on open source software, and everyone will benefit. That is a good thing! The sub-title of this book is on target: it is a primer on open source as business strategy. To that I would add what I have recommended to the organizers of OSCON, that managers be very aware of the others opens: Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), Open Spectrum, Open Access, Open Culture, Open Innovation, Open Society, and Open Circle/Open Space. There are others emerging. Open is now a meme as well as a culture, and this book helps us to understand why that is and why that matters.