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Kartik Subbarao is an independent consultant with extensive experience in open source strategy, architecture, and implementation. His career includes over 16 years at Hewlett-Packard in a variety of engineering and technical leadership positions in R&D, Consulting and IT. He was the founding Global Lead for HP's Open Source and Linux Profession, a community of practice for thousands of open source technologists across the company. Kartik has a BSE from Princeton University and an MSE from Stanford University. He is the author of Enlightening Technical Leadership, a book about bringing greater self-awareness to technology work.
Authored Comments
For me personally, I find that the better that I can let go of my possessiveness to my own intellectual property, the less barriers that I end up constructing in my own mind, the more genuinely I can receive feedback about my work, and the more that I can be open to transformative ideas in any form, from any source.
It doesn't mean that I have to cultivate some sort of animosity towards intellectual property as a whole, and/or compulsively release everything that I create into the public domain all the time. Because that too creates mental barriers.
It's about being able to choose my response more consciously, and not be controlled by the mental construct of intellectual property, one way or the other. Easier said than done, but it is a promising practice.
I feel somewhat out of my league responding to a Frenchman on the topic of love, but I'll give it a try :-) There's a popular quote attributed to Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull:
"If you love something, set it free. If it comes back to you, it's yours. If it doesn't, it never was".
These are the kinds of lessons in freedom that I think open source can teach exquisitely well.
By all means, recognize people who contribute, treat people fairly, create a collaborative and collegial atmosphere -- there's nothing in what I said that contradicts any of that. What I would simply say to you is, while you're doing all that good stuff, just be <em>aware</em> of your various identifications, strings, relationships, etc. Whatever we can do mindfully is wiser than what is done unconsciously.