Hiring open source developers

Socialtext loves to hire developers with open source experience and reputation. We know people are good developers. We know they have initiative and have gotten things done. We know they have creative ideas, because thos ideas are public. People who’ve been active in open source have a public community reputation.
And I’m beginning to think that it is a great way to do the R part of R&D. One of the big problems with classic corporate R&D is that innovations don’t see the light of day. The typical corporate reaction is to put researchers on a short leash, and tell them their blue-sky research needs to turn into a commercial product in a finite amount of time.
An alternative approach is to do open source experimentation. If the experiment is interesting and valuable, it will attract other developers. So you’re building an ecosystem from the start rather than stifling it. If it works and seems valuable, you can package and develop and commercialize it — or leave it to an independent noncommercial life.
It increases one risk, because new ideas aren’t secret. It decreases the risk of developing products in the lab that don’t ever work or get done or find users.

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