open culture

It ain’t easy being open in today’s corporate environment. It’s even harder for an open company to stick to its knitting when it joins forces with a much larger, much more entrenched player in its industry. Is it possible for a small company to stay true to its more 21^st century values if it hopes to reach the heights of its 20^th century predecessors? » Read more

Do the cultures of proprietary companies impede innovation? Do open source companies need a different sort of leadership? I've got my theories, but I don't have much to compare it to from my own experiences. I've been at Red Hat, a very open culture, for seven years and did a two-year tour at Alcatel before that. So I caught up with Cheryl McKinnon, Chief Marketing Officer at Nuxeo, an open source enterprise content management company, to explore open culture, leadership, and history. » Read more

Greetings from the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC), held in San Francisco, CA this week. There's a lot of talk about open source, but not a lot of talk about the open source way. So it's time to tell you about the stories you haven't heard from the conference yet. The stories about the people I met and how they are using open source principles. » Read more

Last week, my friend Greg DeKoenigsberg posted an article about Jaron Lanier's negative comments regarding open textbooks. At almost very same time, I happened to stumble upon an article Jaron wrote back in 2006 criticizing Wikipedia. » Read more

"Open source is a good idea, but no one uses it in the real world." "We can't risk our business on open source--where are the major players?" "We need to know it can work." If you've worked in the IT industry for the past ten years or so, you can remember similar quotes. » Read more

It's a good bet that the next generation of defining companies will have corporate cultures built the open source way-- around openness and collaboration, while fostering community and culture that extend outside the company walls.

In fact many of the defining companies of the first decade of this century show these characteristics (with one very notable exception we discussed earlier).
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