Working with open source

Jonathan Schwartz compares the rise of open source to the current challenges that newspapers are seeing with the rise of citizen journalism.

There are all kinds of interesting parallels between the newspaper industry and the software industry. Both are undergoing tremendous change, creating havoc for some and opportunity for others.

An open source company became Sun’s largest competitor, and Sun (like Microsoft is deal with now) had to decide what strategy would best allow them to compete.

Could we have sued them? Sure. But suing the open source community would’ve been tantamount to a newspaper suing the authors of their letters to the editor. It wouldn’t have addressed the broader challenge - community content was becoming more interesting to our customers than our professional content.

Today Sun also puts their money where their mouth is by promising, in a legally binding manner to not enforce against OpenID any patents that OpenID might violate.