Mass Collaboration

This article goes on to describe a struggling company on the verge of folding looking for new ways to reinvent themselves. The chief executive officer of the company posted his problems online looking for any type of help and to his suprise his challenge made a total of $575,000 in prize money for the people who submitted the best methods to his problems.

Everything about the corporation was posted online, which to me seems like a bad idea. But it worked out for the chief executive officer. The chief executive officer stated, " We had applied math, advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics, and organic solutions to inorganic problems. There were capabilities I had never seen before in the industry. When I saw the computer graphics, I almost fell out of my chair."

Because it is a mining industry, over 8million ounces of gold have been found since his online proposition. This amount of gold is worth over 3million dollars. However, the company still faces many substantial problems, but now the chief officer is open to open source and mass collaboration for any ideas and implementations on how to make things right.

Open Source Software

It seems as if more and more people are beginning to use Open Source Software such as Mozilla FireFox and Linux. A man by the name of Richard Stallman trademarked the term "open source" but not really being concerned with freedom. Open source was formally organized in 1998 by Tim O'Reilly, Eric Raymond and other people in Silicon Valley. The real value of open source is to alleviate controversy not generate it. Thus, the focus point became open source code and the values companies can derive from it, not the personalities.

Many people are stuck in the middle of open source software and propriety software because as the article states they "cant afford to cling to one or the other", so they just keep switching back and forth. Open software seems as if it is the future and, to me, appears to have the greater potential.