Lessons on Open Source from a 25-Year-Old Company
summary
Red Hat’s 25‑year experiment shows concrete rules and outcomes: a corporate policy explicitly allows employees to contribute to outside projects even when votes harm company interest, enabling project-first governance; a patent promise and Microsoft’s transfer of ~60,000 patents to OIN demonstrably reduce litigation risk; Linux, Netscape’s open sourcing and later Mozilla led to real products; GitHub hosts ~20 million repos; licensing choices (GPL vs permissive/Eclipse) shape business paths; treat projects and products differently — projects enable permissionless innovation, products require QA, roadmaps and risk reduction.
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chapters (4)
- 0:00Start
- 25:03VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF FREE SOFTWARE
- 34:35Licensing determines the business model. - If you compel source redistribution, how do you build
- 40:19What is an Open Source Project?
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