Archive for October 18th, 2008

The other day, I invited someone to join my LinkedIn network (my profile!).  The default message is something along the lines of “since you are someone I trust, I would like to add you to my network.”

The key word is trust.  I believe that LinkedIn means in terms of who they are.  I trust that that person is actually…that person.  A friend, colleague, etc.  However, someone at work took that as meaning trustworthiness, reliability, etc.  She asked me what she had done to earn my trust, since we had only worked on a few projects.

First, she is working with my group on a few projects now so I do know that she is very diligent and detail-oriented.  So far, she seems pretty okay.  So it’s not like I based my response to her query on a complete lack of information.

However, it seemed weird that someone would question the invite anyway.  This has lots of room for misinterpretation but it felt like I was being accused of “do you really, seriously want me to believe that I have gained your trust…?” kind of snarkiness.

Eh.  I’m obviously being sensitive here.  I don’t feel anything negative about it, in reality but it was just weird.

Report: Pure Open Source No Longer a Viable Business Model – ReadWriteWeb

When I worked at Stanford, I was able to watch, firsthand, the open source project that has since become Sakai.  This is a multi-university, complex project to develop a learning management system designed for universities, by universities.  This would be in comparison to Blackboard, which is owned by a company and run like one at times.

The idea all along was to offer the application as open source once it was all “done.”  However, the team ran into a number of obstacles, and that’s just what I saw myself.  For instance, the type of back-end database.  Ours was Oracle, but you can’t really launch an open source product that relies on Oracle.  So a mySQL version had to be built. 

This article is different – it’s about offering an open source project and then building a business model around it that will actually make money.  But the truth, and I think anyone that has tried to actually maintain a business around an open source project will second this, is that it’s not easy to build around such offerings.  At some point the effort to continue development overwhelms the benefit of the project and the revenue stream cannot sustain the costs.

I’m still a big fan of open source products.  But I don’t see myself developing an open source business.