September 7th, 2006
Open source offers new corporate responsibility twist
Two stories came across the desk today, both of which involve open source companies working to serve the greater good and benefit themselves at the same time.
Together they illustrate an important trend.
Funambol announced a Community Sniper program. The idea is they will pay bounties of $2,000 to folks who link their mobile tools to popular Personal Information Managers (PIMs), like those of Skype, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft.
This is cool for several reasons. Unemployed programmers can make money. New talent may get discovered. The tools will, once written, improve the usefulness of cellphones. This will also help Funambol make more money. That may be the coolest reason of all.
Then we have RedHat. (Sorry we’re going in alphabetical order here.) They are championing a government-run forum to announce software vulnerabilities. The idea is that the key to minimizing damage from a program hole is to get the word and the fix out as quickly as possible. Put everyone on the same page, put it under government auspices, and no one gets their corporate ego bruised.
This is also cool for several reasons. Faster bug fixes mean better code. Faster closing of back doors means more secure code. Getting everyone together on something like this makes things easier for everyone. This will also help RedHat make more money. That, too, is the coolest reason of all.
Two more points.
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These are the kinds of positive outcomes (win-win) enterprise software companies used to tackle routinely. Nice to see RedHat taking on the challenge.
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There is an open source twist on both these stories. I don’t remember ever seeing Microsoft offer to pay freelancers, and proprietary outfits hate sharing bad news.
Open source is changing the world in many, many ways. One of them is by redefining corporate responsibility, and how to meet it.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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