Everybody Has A Share

Leveraging pitchforks

"Building a commercial company dependant on a volunteer community is tough to say the least. Of course RedHat developed their own flavor of Linux, but they did it by leveraging an existing enormous community of developers who were at their wits end with Microsoft. In their case the peasants (the developer community) were coming over the hills with pitch forks ready to attack Microsoft, and the smart people at RedHat were able to leverage the movement. Good for RedHat. There's no such movement in network management." -- Steve Goodman, February 2008

Public decision-making

"What makes something like Linux successful isn't the availability of code; most people never even see it. The important part of open-source is transparency and a decision-making process open to public criticism." -- Tim O'Brien, September 2004

20-year-old apps that still work

"20 year old UNIX apps still work today! And enterprises like that kind of ROI." -- Christian Gross, September 2004

The value of de facto standards

"While we might not always like it, de facto standards work. Not always, and not perfectly, but they definitely create value & user benefit." -- Dean Bubley, September 2006

The hard part of building a standard

"The hard part of building a standard is getting the right people at the table." -- Ian Murdock, January 2007

Standards by users

"Sometimes it's the users who create the standards." -- Doc Searls, Identity Gang (a private Google Group),  August 2005

What makes specifications useful

"A specification in itself is useless without a community backing and a roadmap for standardization." -- Deepak Alur, May 2005

Data standards in cars

"It turns out that every car sold in the U.S. since 1996 provides a standard interface to the fault management system." -- Ken Gibson, April 2005

Better interoperability through compilation

"Enough people are writing software in the world today that you are going to get complexity, and if you try to replace that complexity, you will fail...a level of interoperation is something you can compile away." -- Richard Soley, May 2006

Wanted: Good plug-in phone software

"Why doesn't the phone provide for a timed period of not ringing (which could have an intelligent default and be easy to override) after which it automatically reverts to ringing again? ...if my phone's software was like Firefox in the sense of having a good plug-in architecture fox extensions, I could do this myself." -- Mitch Kapor, April 2006