crear-de-manera-distribuida

A pocos días de partir a Chile quiero dejar algunos materiales que pueden ser interesantes para quienes estén familiarizados o atraídos por el uso & estudio del software libre.

El primero es un libro titulado: Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Open Source as Business Strategy de Ron Goldman & Richard P. Gabriel (2005). Si bien este trabajo se puede conseguir en Amazon también es posible acceder a él a través de la Red.

El texto de estos ex alumnos de la Stanford University se presenta en un formato interesante. Permite al lector leer una buena parte del libro en línea, sin que parezca un e-book como tal. El análisis de este trabajo, descrito en 10 capítulos plantea una idea afín a los postulados más celosamente defendidos en esta bitácora: la arquitectura abierta de creación del software open source es un modo de trabajar-y-de-crear-de-manera-distribuida enriqueciendo de manera significativa tanto el proceso como el resultado. Aquí unos extractos de este interesante material.

Open source is a way of building closer relationships with your customers and better relationships with your developers. An open-source project breaks down organizational boundaries both within your company and between your company and the outside world. Open source results in software that better meets the needs of its users, both in terms of better fit and higher reliability.

What the open-source community has proven is that individuals--and, by extension, companies--can work together on a much more discrete, iterative level. People are starting to understand that having interaction between developers on a daily basis during development is far more valuable than waiting through the typical product-revision cycles.

In a collaborative situation, a competently designed artifact can be perfected through the application of many individual acts of improvement. In such a situation, people with talents spanning a variety of areas will apply their expertise to the artifact, and perhaps it will become as good as it can be based on where it started.

Open source provides opportunities for both types of innovation and creativity. The competitive type derives from interactions and conversations with the communities surrounding the source code, which can provide triggers leading to innovations. The collaborative type happens when a piece of software undergoes a long and continuous process of redesign based on a set of slowly dawning insights.

Vía La Grieta me encuentro con un interesante documental acorde al libro de Goldman y Gabriel, se llama Revolution OS. Este trabajo es una síntesis del génesis y fundamento de Open Source GNU/Linux. Quizá lo más interesante del trabajo es que los propios protagonistas de la historia del open source son quienes cuentan esta historia. Todo un lujo.

Webs Recomendadas en el libro:
Apple Darwin.
CollabNet.
Creative Commons.
Fink.
Free Software Foundation.
Free Software Foundation's Savannah.
GForge.
HP open-source projects.
IBM open-source projects.
Intel open-source projects.
Mozilla.
Novell open-source projects.
OpenOffice project.
Open Source Initiative.
Oracle open-source projects.
SGI open-source projects.
Slashdot.
SourceForge.
Sun open-source projects.
Visualization ToolKit (VTK).