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Geeks bearing gifts

By Nicholas Gruen - posted Tuesday, 9 August 2005


Geeks bearing gifts. Solving problems, adding features.

As a leaked confidential memo within Microsoft put it, open-source’s ability to “collect and harness the collective IQ of thousands of individuals across the Internet is simply amazing.”

So why am I chuffed?

Advertisement

My column was based on a longer essay just published in the Australian magazine Policy. I've published more original and important articles but, without big marketing efforts they mostly gather dust in university libraries. Until now.

Within a week of being posted on the Internet, the article had gone “open-source”, being downloaded thousands of times from the Policy website. It was picked up at osnews.com sparking an online discussion. My favourite comments? “Brilliant essay" and "beautiful article" - then again, it was a beautiful topic.

Then I got an e-mail from Brazil. The author said similarly nice things about the essay and requested permission to translate it into Portuguese for a Brazilian website. The fortune of my essay extolling the power of open-source was itself illustrating the power of open-source.

But wait, there’s more. For a while now, I’ve discussed themes from my columns on a group weblog - you can find it by Googling “Troppo Armadillo”. I now send drafts of columns to some weblog readers before you read them. They suggest improvements and help iron out bugs - just like Linux. Everyone wins including this e-journal which gets better columns.

So the power is with them - or maybe with you!

In the words of Microsoft: “simply amazing”. Or “simples surpreendente”, as they say in Brazil.

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First published in The Courier-Mail on July 19, 2005.



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About the Author

Dr Nicholas Gruen is CEO of Lateral Economics and Chairman of Peach Refund Mortgage Broker. He is working on a book entitled Reimagining Economic Reform.

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