Today’s must-read is Paul Graham’s essay, “What Business Can Learn From Open Source.” Some choice nuggets:
— “I suspect professionalism was always overrated — not just in the literal sense of working for money, but also connotations like formality and detachment. Inconceivable as it would have seemed in, say, 1970, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century.”
— “I’m convinced the facetime model is the main reason large organizations have so many meetings. Per capita, large organizations accomplish very little. And yet all those people have to be on site at least eight hours a day. When so much time goes in one end and so little achievement comes out the other, something has to give. And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack.”
— “Ironically, though open source and blogs are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states.”
— “It’s a lot harder to create something people love than to take something people love and figure out how to make money on it.”