We've put online a transcript of notes taken at a conference on Open Source Software at Networld InterOP, in Las Vegas. It covers a panel discussion between Tim O'Reilly (O'Reilly & Associates), Greg Olson (Sendmail Inc.), and David Beckemeyer (EarthLink Networks Inc.). A short clip is below. The article is available at: http://www.seul.org/pub/oss_conference_interop.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Question from the audience: Besides free labor, what good qualities of the Open Source Software movement can be injected into internal projects? O'Reilly: Good design is good design. Linus says that Linux succeeded partially because it has a clean design, from the get go. Microsoft Windows could never have succeeded as Open Source because it's not a clean design. The most successful Open Source projects are basically very clean designs. Linus makes this point in his essay in our Open Sources book: part of the success of Linux is based on good fundamental design decisions. Larry Wall makes the same point in his essay in the book about Perl--it succeeded because it was well designed for its purpose. Related points: Fred Baker, chair of IETF: 'One of the things we did really well is that we agreed that we would standardize on the absolute minimum of things we needed to standardize on, and leave the rest to evolution and chance.' A kind of a minimalism is a guiding principle. That's part of the reason it works: programs have known inputs and outputs. It being UNIX. That's part of the reason UNIX has been been such a great basis for open source projects. Another piece is that OSS is not a magic bullet. Most of these projects didn't start out with someone trying to write software for other people. They wrote the software to solve their own problem. Eric Allman created sendmail in the early days of the Arpanet because it was easier for him to relay people's mail than to give 700 other people at UC Berkeley login accounts on his machine. Larry Wall had a problem. He wrote simple code to solve his problem. The same is true of Perl. Larry Wall wrote it to solve some problems he was struggling with. Then he gave it away because he thought other people might have the same class of problems. I like to say that your "return on investment" is the solution to your own problem. What you get back from other people is just an extra dividend. EarthLink is a case in point: they've done a lot of custom design to solve their own problems. Open Source may flourish the best in arenas where there isn't a lot of competitive advantage to be had. === SEUL-Announce list, [EMAIL PROTECTED] ===