Open source or proprietary?
Categorized under Software
Open source software development methodology is based on voluntary contribution from geeks around the globe. Followers of it strongly believe into evolutionary and collaborative progress. It appeals to giving-back nature of people and as participants work on projects they enjoy to work on, naturally gives better quality products. On the other hand, proprietary i.e. closed source software development methodology is more formal in nature. Companies hire people with required skill set and pay them to develop products in required timeframes with specified requirements. Companies themselves have profitability motivations driven by competitive market. Open source seems more predominant in academia while proprietary looks prevalent in industry; which is quite as expected because knowledge sharing is the ultimate focus in academia while money is what counts most in industry.
“History confirms that knowledge sharing has fostered accumulative scientific progress avoiding reinventing-the-wheel phenomenon. If scientists had kept their inventions secret and instead had provided fees based services over those inventions, without revealing the logic behind it, then we would have still been in an era of wondering whether the Earth rotates round the Sun or the Sun rotates round the Earth!”
Open source supporters often argue somewhere along the above lines to promote it as a better software development methodology. And then counter arguments posed by proprietary software followers go into somewhat the direction below …
Is One Laptop Per Child really a solution?
Categorized under Large Scale
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a non-profit initiative founded by Nicholas Negroponte (co-founder and director of MIT Media Lab). He has a vision to improve lives of underprivileged communities around the globe through betterment of education provided to their children. In his eyes, this laptop will act as a window for those curious kids to connect to each other and to a large information resource on the internet. “Whatever the solutions to the big problems are, they include education; sometimes it can be just education and (rest of the times) can never be without some element of education!“, he states.
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On the other hand, critics of this project often consider this as band-aid solution to a more serious injury. In their opinion, spending money on providing gadgets to people - who are yet struggling to meet their basic needs - is naïve and ridiculous.
What’s business model, precisely?
Categorized under Basics
“Confusion” is the word that comes to my mind whenever I think of the term Business Model. It is one of the most loudly discussed topics, especially since 1990s. Interesting part is that most (or should I say almost all) of the research literature over this topic contain two arguments without fault –
The first argument is somewhat like -
“A good business model is an essential ingredient of business success.”And the second argument is somewhat like -
“Business model is a widely spoken but rarely understood concept.”
There are loads of research papers and published resources that talk about the concept of business model as well as the confusion over the topic; and often cause more confusion as different authors take different views.
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