Open Source Course for Managers? 97
faqmaster asks: "I teach systems analysis and design as part of programming and project management tracks at a community college, and I'm interested in putting together a course for project-managers on open-source software. What suggestions would the Slashdot community have as far as what managers need to know/understand about Open Source? What books would you suggest? Anyone have any especially good case studies of successful OSS implementations in the business world? Any insight as to how project managers and the like can successfully incorporate open-source into thier projects? What advantages might they see? What are the pitfalls?"
What companies need for open source (Score:4, Insightful)
-Chardish
I disagree (Score:2)
Re:I disagree (Score:2)
Clear coding is very important, but clear coding only happens in the context of a clearly defined and well thought out code architecture. Such an architecture ought to come before anyone codes a line of anything except prototypes for feasibility investigations. A clear architectural document is more important for new programmers on a project than any amount of comments or of well-chosen class and member names.
Tim
Re:I disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
A major part of the user interface was clicking on vertices in the routing layout and dragging them around. When you have 10,000 vertices visible in the window, this can get obnoxious if you don't have a good and unambiguous selection mechanism.
Unfortunately, when I came on board, we had a bad and ambiguous selection mechanism.
We had weekly meetings of all the coders (that includes all the grad students who were doing the actual research) and we'd discuss new ideas. I'd seen a whole lot of ideas get passed around at previous meetings, and no matter the idea, it was always met with grave resistance. People wanted feasability studies, analyses, reports, blah blah blah. It was nasty. Far worse than any company I've worked for since, but that was academia, so it's not surprising.
So before presenting my new interface, I coded it up (took me 4 hours) and put it into the standard build. This was on a Tuesday. So for 3 days (Wednesday, Thursday, and part of Friday) people were using my new interface without realising it. I noticed a distinct change in the character of the conversations going on. But the change was subtle enough that no one immediately came to me to discuss it. Previous to my change, there was always a lot of grumbling and cursing whenever someone selected the wrong vertex, and all those stopped suddenly when I installed the new interface.
Friday came and I presented my new interface idea. People were very down on it. They wanted studies. They wanted an analysis of the time it would take to code it. They wanted references to existing peer reviewed user interface studies. Blah blah blah. I knew that would happen. So then I dropped the bombshell. I explained that I already coded it, it took 4 hours, and they've all been using it since Wednesday morning. The expressions on their faces and the stunned silence were precious. Apparently they were going over their use of the UI in their heads over the past few days, because shortly the room erupted in very complimentary discussion all around.
Of course I was told not to do that again, but I considered it an unqualified success. Not only did I get my new mechanism into the project, not only was the new mechanism successful, but I also managed to show everyone how damned bureaucratic they were being, and how much damage they were doing to the productivity of the project.
It was beautiful.
The point of this story is that a successful feature depends much more on the end result, not on the process. The function is far more important than the process. Sure, the process is important, but when you find yourself sacrificing functionality for the sake of process, you've just lost the war. Clear coding is nice. An architecture document is nice (I agree that a well thought out architecture is essential, but that is different from a well thought out written architecture). But they are both pale shadows when weighed against the final product.
Re:I disagree (Score:2)
Well, the idiotification certainly exists. There's two main process I've encountered:
Aging, a genetically inherited disease that 100% of humanity currently suffers from. Aging of the brain has been experimentally determined to cause the inability to learn and decrease in intelligence
Alcohol abuse. In western society, undergraduates in many universities engage in "drinking games" and the like, which effectively amount to poisoning their own brains. A significant proportion of undergraduates do get noticeably stupider as "student life" takes its toll.
Re:I disagree (Score:2, Informative)
There are two things that you apparently don't realize.
The first is that academia is overwhelmed by politics and jockeying for position. This is most prevalent among graduate students (who are struggling to attract influential professors as research sponsors) and among associate professors (whor are struggling to advance along the tenure track, which has progressively fewer openings the farther you travel). In academia, it's not the project that matters, but how you're able to leverage that project for personal advancement. Yes, the corporate world has politics as well, but aside from a few rare companies, corporate politics are babies struggling over teddybears in the crib compared to academic politics.
The other thing that you don't realize is that the nature of user interface design is that it is subtle. You need to come up with mechanisms that help the user out without the user being made aware that they're being helped out. That's the whole game. So if you come up with a successful mechanism, that mechanism is, by the very nature of the game, subtle.
Here are the details:
When I came on board, vertices were selected by clicking the mouse within 20 pixels of the vertice's location. When you have a lot of vertices on the screen, these regions overlap, and the specific vertex that gets selected when you click in an overlap is unpredictable (it depends on the ordering of the vertices in the data structures). You could even end up selecting a vertex that was scrolled out of the visible area of the layout.
My change was to define "pick regions". These regions were dynamic, depending on your view, the vertex density, etc. The way it worked was that I iterated over the visible vertexes (we had a data structure that made this easy, and also let us easily find the vertices closest to a particular x,y coordinate: that was another research project in itself). For any click location, I found the eight closest vertices. For each vertex, I calculated its weighted distance from the click location (I used distance-squared, rather than distance, for reasons that will become apparent). I found the vertex that had the smallest distance, and then I looked for the vertex with the second smallest distance. That second vertex's distance had to be at least 35% larger (that was a tunable parameter, and my experiments showed that 35% number to be the best) than the first vertex's distance in order for the first vertex to be selected. If that test failed, then no vertex was selected. All of these calculations were done using screen coordinates (pixels) rather than routing coordinates, so that the view parameters would get incorporated into the calculation. The net result of this is that each vertex was surrounded by a lumpy region that was "owned" by that vertex. Any click in that region would select the owning vertex. The regions were lumpy because their shape in any direction would depend on the neighboring vertices. But by using a distance-squared metric, the lumpiness was somewhat smoothed out, thereby avoiding long and counterintuitive peninsulae spreading through the layout (and spared me the cost of a square root calculation). The overshoot requirement ensured that there were gaps between every pick region, where a click wouldn't select any vertex. These gaps were about 16% of the vertex density (sqrt(1.35) ~= 1.16). So they were small enough that it would be hard to click in a gap, but large enough that any click that fell outside of a gap was unambiguously associated with the same vertex for both the computer and the user.
The change had two results: 1) when the user successfully selected a vertex, it was always the same vertex that the user intended, and 2) when the user was being ambiguous, no vertex would get selected. The second possibility also existed in the previous mechanism, so it wasn't noticeable. And the first possibility meant that the users never ended up selecting the wrong vertex.
So, yes, the change was subtle. It wasn't subtle to someone looking at the code, but at that time the UI was 5MB of dense X11 and Motif code, so the researchers never ventured into it. We also had a standing policy that no one was to touch anyone else's module, and if anyone needed UI work done, they were to come talk to me to code it. This all means that they never even looked into the code until after my bombshell was dropped.
Re:I disagree (Score:2)
For user experience, an interactive prototype can often speak louder than a written specification. Again, it's too bad the review process was so dysfunctional that you had to sneak the prototype in, but in a well-functioning organization, creating a prototype build and showing it around to the stakeholders would be a valuable part of the user interface specification process.
Tim
Re:I disagree (Score:2)
I will make the point, however, that the projects that many, if not most, programmers work on do not great deal of formal up front design work. What's more, it's often outside of the scope of their job. Trying to over-design can be terribly unproductive.
Re:great... (Score:1, Funny)
to make young boys feel good about themselves.
On other hand all Microsoft's buggy software
mostly produced by young college graduates
without serious skills and experience, it is
why it is so BUGGY. Choise is yours...
Just This: (Score:2, Insightful)
Now for buzzwords. They need to hear that it is scalable, robust, and will boost productivity.
And they need to know about programs such as StarOffice [sun.com] That are in a great many cases, better then Microsoft Office, along with offering compatibility with existing systems. In short, there's almost nothing that a large firm puts out that cannot be replicated in an open source enviroment.
Re:Just This: (Score:1)
Great Tips I've Discovered (Score:4, Informative)
Define terminology. When you begin working on a project, nail down work-related definitions and make sure everyone involved understands them.
Document decisions. Any time you and your team makes a project-related decision, write it down. Include an overview of the rationale behind the resolution.
Group project deliverables. For long-term or ongoing projects, you can reduce project-management administrative burdens by delivering work in batches.
This will reduce the number of times that you need to contact your client and will allow you to consolidate feedback sessions and next steps.
Rework notes immediately. After you finish project meetings or phone calls, review your notes immediately and fill in details you remember from the session but did not write down. At the same time, make a list of next steps and mark the date they need to be completed on your calendar.
Keep everyone informed. Nothing is worse for a project team than to be left in the dark. Morale will drop quickly if team members complete work, and then discover the project has shifted direction and their efforts were for naught. Missteps like this also waste project resources, lengthen timelines and increase costs. Make sure the communication processes you have in place keep everyone informed. It is better to copy people on e-mails that may not directly affect them than to leave them off these communications completely.
Set realistic expectations. Project success is often measured in three ways: on-time delivery, high quality and reasonable cost. A typical project will allow for two of these items to be achieved, so while it's important to reach for all three goals, good managers prioritize them. They know that if they want a project on time and at cost, the level of detail they can hope for may slip. Likewise, if they want high quality at a low cost, they may need to stretch timelines.
Re:Great Tips I've Discovered (Score:1, Informative)
That's just good software development practices.
there is no spoon (Score:2, Funny)
The usual "Why ask Slashdot?" answer... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The usual "Why ask Slashdot?" answer... (Score:2)
If you can get managers to understand that there is not one single thing called "open source software", but rather a range of licensing and development models that fit that name, you've solved half of your problem.
OSS in The Real World (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OSS in The Real World (Score:1)
If anything, this seems to be a point that is all too often overlooked in both corporate environments and my own instructional classes.
It's terribly unfortunate, since I've found this is also the best way I can explore new programming concepts. Design, Prototype, Code, Revise, Repeat...AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE. I really wish I would have been taught this in my own curriculum, but it became apparant to me (and I assume many others) the more and more I used open software.
The same truism, I beleive, would apply to any development project, closed or open. I would, however, venture to say that the cycle is more effective the more developers you can involve in the process, since the revisions can happen at a faster rate. If there is anything that open source has taught me is that the process of developing open software can enable rapid evolution of projects and help both weed out the bugs or inefficiencies in applications and also stimulate the development of new extensions at an incredible pace.
If anything, I think this should be emphasized as not one, but perhaps THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect of managing development and / or implementation of open projects. Just my $.02, though. ;)
BJ Hoffpauir
Time Trend, Inc. [timetrend.com]
Book (Score:4, Informative)
as a good starting point.
OSS Saved Amazon and Intel(!) $$ (Score:1, Offtopic)
"Free operating system Linux was another unexpected result from ad hoc Internet collaboration embraced by Intel, saving the chipmaker $200 million," Busch said. The company ditched expensive Unix servers with proprietary Unix software and replaced them with cheaper servers equipped with Intel's own chips that run Linux software.
Amazon also made the switch [zdnet.com] In some ways, this is even better.
Online retailer Amazon.com shaved millions of dollars from its technology costs last quarter by switching to the Linux operating system, a disclosure that could provide some guidance for other companies seeking to cut expenses in a stagnant economy.
Provide guidance for other companies? And the title, "Linux saved us millions." Sounds great to me. At least some corporations finally seem to be learning that OSS does have advantages, and they can in many cases be spelled out in nice, crisp greenbacks.
What works for Apache (Score:5, Informative)
- How to get involved [apache.org]
- An email from an Apache developer that explains how he got started [metronet.com]
- Project Guidelines [apache.org]
- Understanding Opensource [apache.org]
Yeah, ok I'm a karma whore. Still, if it helps this guy what's the harm?Deploy or Build (Score:3, Insightful)
Many companies, including Cisco where I work, have made strong use of open source software and deployed it extensively - this is different from developing it. Make sure you deal with them separately.
All the problems that exists in traditional software development, also exists in open source plus some new ones because of communication and distributed control issues. It's not like you can easily fire an open source developer (and that is good
Regarding support... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just like any other business process... (Score:1)
A lot of the problems I see with the ManagerOSS business relationship come down to lack of information. Let's face it, if I were a decision maker with a clearly defined solution on my left hand with well understood capabilities and limitations and I was weighing that up against a (potentially much better) solution on my right hand but with poorly defined risks etc. then I'm going to go with the certainty.. Imagine the inquisition if a gamble failed on something where I hadn't characterised the risks!!! I like my job!
Contrary to popular opinion, a great many managers are smart people - they can weigh things up when they're given the information. If they don't get the information they're frequently too busy to go search it out for themselves, so instead they default to the safe option...even if it's sub-optimal.
So, explain the various OSS licences and their capabilities and limitations (especially the differences between GPL and BSD type licences). Explain the 'ethics' of the OSS community and *how* and *why* people build OSS code (often the most difficult thing for BusinessHeads to get their minds around). Then (the most difficult bit) explain _clearly_ and _without editorial_ the limitations of OSS and how these might be contained in the particular circumstances you face.. then you might find you get a pleasant surprise from some of those higher ups...
Just like any project management course. (Score:4, Informative)
Most people in a team/project enviornment fall into one of these catagories:
1) Coder; the one that can hack code like there is no tomorrow.
2) Cheerleader; the person that "cheers" everyone on and tries to motivate everyone.
3) Idea man; a person with a gift of "thinking outside" the problem. Usually very smart and somewhat competent as a coder/pseudocoder. Usually thinks of everything except the "how" to do something.
4) diplomat; Usually the project manager him/her self. The one that can "herd cats" or talk to the previous 3, iron out differences and balance all the powers of 1 thru 3.
The more you think about it, the more it is dead on. I've had the advantage, if you will, of observing several teams after learning this little tidbit. Once you see it, you can not un-see it.
The point is: You need all of these types, period.
As the PM you need to recognise these talents reguardless of working in person or via email/IM or whatever communications are your norm.
I give you Linus and Bill G. as prime examples.
They know how to motivate people by using their natural talents, they both know when to say "good job", "work on it some more" or (bill g, IIRC) "that is the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard of".
As a PM you have the most challenging job, but have to realise that w/o the 3 types, the project is hobbled or dead.
Example of MS/FSF, again offers plenty of insight as to what goes right/wrong with development.
With MS, the divisions are political, social, and idealogical.
With Free Software, timezones/distance, language barriers and occasionally egos.
So, if a book is not around to help, go to a university nearby, and see these dynamics for yourself.
Never know, you might be the one to write the book yourself, with or without the help of a psychology and computer sci. phd.
Cheers,
GISboy
Re:Just like any project management course. (Score:1)
With Free Software, timezones/distance, language barriers and occasionally egos."
--> Increasingly it seems the free software mob are suffering from political/social/idealogical differences, especially RMS vs not RMS style mentalities. These tendencies show no real desire to die out, even if they are just being put down to "big egos" at the moment, with the kernel VM arguments showing no real signs of abating, it's seemingly determined to go down hill, as the groups fracture and splinter more and more.
Let them in slowly (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that to start with, The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a good read. Though it's a little outdated, being somewhat in the dot-com mood, it offers some well reasoned argument behind using open source methods alongside more traditional business practices. But the real hurdle is convincing people that software written by "amateurs" (because that's how they often see unpaid programmers, unfortunately), and distributed for free, can be reliable and powerful. You also have to impress upon them how easy it is to integrate open source with their current goods, to get them out of the mindset that offices have to have Microsoft-everything.
One thing I would say is that most managers, unless they're in financial difficulties, don't jump at the "it's cheap" idea.
Re:Let them in slowly (Score:1)
But Free/Open Source software is still an economic godsend for a lot of companies. And it is a noble thing to try and promote such software to companies to try and further the social and political aims of the Free Software and Open Source movements. If all people cared about was the economy, we'd have idiots for politicians and social degredation. Hmm, sounds familiar come to think of it...
I would talk about... (Score:5, Informative)
Embracing Insanity: Open Source SW Development (Score:2, Informative)
I wrote the book "Embracing Insanity: Open Source Software Development" to educate management about the ways of Open Source. It deals less with project methodology and more with the social dynamics of the community, but you might find it helpful.
Here's a pointer to the Slashdot book review [slashdot.org] of it.
Project leadership. (Score:2, Informative)
It is really just a (closed, moderated) mailing list right now, but I hope to distill some of the discussion into some sort of "OSS Leadership How-to" or something.
It is still in the preliminary stages, but we can't grow without members . . .
If you are the leader of an OSS project I hope you will check it out!
Feel free to mail me at my
-Peter
PS: I use "OSS" above because the project is about the process (as opposed to the philosophy). Truth be known I tend to be a "Free Software Guy" but the project is intended to be agnostic about the OSS/Free Software debate.
Code Complete (Score:1, Informative)
Described simply, it tells how to design then write good code and code pieces, and how to document without the usual burden of "oh, rats, I guess I have to document now". Among his suggestions is to use your outline and/or pseudocode _as_ the documentation, by just filling the code in, rather than seeing documentation as a seperate step. If it's good enough for you to code by, it's probably better than any after-the-fact retro attempt at documenting.
He also deals with managing code projects that have high programmer turnover, very relevant to OSS.
The ISBN is 1-55615-484-4, ignore who published it. Seriously-- it's from (he shudders to say on
Actually, all programmers should read it.
AdAce's OSS work (Score:5, Informative)
At AdAce (shameless plug [adace.com]), I pressured my CEO to let me build the website on top of OSS tools and systems. It was a relatively easy sell at the time, because I (the CSO) and the CTO were both OSS enthusiasts, and we got a lot of respect from our CEO for our technical expertise. This wasn't one of those micromanaging CEOs that some companies have.
Now I'm both CTO and CSO, and I'm quite happy with the result of using OSS wherever possible.
The website linked above is built on top of Apache, Linux, GIMP, MySQL, mod_ssl, and smail. We use gcc and all the other g-tools to build the beast. (We wanted to use PNG for all our graphics, but IE's support for PNG is just too horrible.)
Our system has only two pieces using closed-source closed-source software.
The first is the library provided to us by our credit card processor in order to communicate with their systems (signio, now bought by verisign). But that library was built using ssleay, and knowing that I was able to patch up the binary library to avoid certain SSL attacks against us. (thank you, ssleay!)
The second piece is our ad servers (realmedia). We chose closed source ad servers because we needed a certain set of features, and the OSS ad servers out there are too far behind in that feature set for us to use them. We could have added the features we need, but that would've but a huge engineering burden on us that we couldn't afford at the time. Now that we've come far enough, we're evaluating the current OSS ad servers to see which one we're going to adopt, and add the features that we need (and, of course, commit those new features back to the project).
The selling points that we used to push the OSS point are:
1) The security of an OSS project is superior to the security of a closed source project. This is because either the security holes are found by other people and patches are submitted back to the project, or I (whose duty it is to analyze our security) can find the problems and fix them. While with a closed source project, this is all dependent on the very busy engineers at the software's vendor, who will always prioritize security below where we would want it prioritized (we want it to be the #1 priority). It's so nice to be free of worrying over priority conflicts between us and a software vendor.
2) The stability is superior for the same reason.
3) Licensing fees are trivial. For most OSS projects, licensing is a voluntary donation to the support organization, and the size of that donation is up to us to determine. For other OSS projects, licensing is free. The only real exception is MySQL, which has specified certain donation levels which, nevertheless, are far lower than competing database software's license fees.
4) When (not if) the vendor of a closed source project moves on to other projects, and abandons the software that we're using, we're screwed. But if we use OSS, then we've got the source code, and can continue to support ourselves. Plus, when that happens, we've developed enough internal expertise with the software that it's not too difficult for us to support ourselves.
Apache, in particular, has been a huge boon to us. It's so easy to write modules for Apache that we've got our server packed to the gills with custom modules to perform certain session management and dynamic content tasks for us. These have improved our website's speed and maintainability by a huge margin. (some of these modules have progressed far enough that we're nearly ready to contribute them back to the Apache project.)
In hindsight, we made one big mistake with our OSS work. That is, whenever we brought some new OSS project on board, we would assign it to one engineer, and that engineer was to become our expert on that system. We spread this load around so that no one engineer would be overburdened. But what we should have done (in addition) was to have a "debriefing" a couple weeks after the assignment, so that that engineer could brain-dump a portion of his expertise into the rest of us. As it happened, we had engineers leave us (which is the usual case in engineering) who were the only people with expertise in a particular piece of the puzzle. And when that happened, we were left scrambling to redevelop the lost expertise. It all turned out ok, but it might not have.
These days, as a large result of using OSS wherever possible, we're in a very good position. Nearly all of our competing ad networks have abandoned the market for greener pastures, and that includes every ad network that's bigger than us except for 24/7 and doubleclick. The other big guys have switched to licensing their proprietary ad servers to other ad networks. As a direct result of our adoption of OSS, our total monthly technology costs are trivial, and we can survive comfortably on a truly tiny number of sales in a month. Having leaned heavily on OSS software, we were also able to focus a lot of our engineering on automating the administration of our system to a large a degree, so our administrative burdens are also tiny. This is letting us ride out this deep depression in our industry without worries, and when things turn around we'll be in a very enviable position.
The only downside to OSS is that there are a large number of licenses to read and discuss with our legal department. This number is, of course, similar to the number of licenses that we would be under if each individual portion of our website used equivalent closed source projects. However, closed source projects tend to bundle multiple pieces together under a single license, so we would actually have fewer pieces (and hence fewer licenses) if we used closed source. What's worse, many OSS projects use licenses that are superficially the same, but contain modifications that are specific to that project. So, though it's tempting to read the opening clauses and conclude that the license is the same as this other license that we already analyzed, it's foolish to do so.
But the bundling phenomenon of closed source projects is actually a disadvantage. Since no closed-source project satisfies all our needs, we would definately need multiple. And if different closed-source pieces overlap in their bundling, then either we have to reject a piece that we'd like to use, or we'd have to find a way to disable the pieces that we don't want to use. That's always a pain.
Re:AdAce's OSS work (Score:1)
Our website, if you had browsed around a bit to see, has an ad banner creator on it. That creator is a cgi front end to a number of scheme scripts that I and a contractor wrote, that run in GIMP's script-fu plugin.
So, yes: GIMP is a deployed part of our website.
Re:AdAce's OSS work (Score:1)
Our website designer [glitchdesign.com] doesn't use macromedia software to generate web pages. But he does play around a lot with flash animations. Has a lot of fun with them. And there's some website out there that gives a lot of tips and info on scripting in flash, which he spends a lot of time browsing. He told me the URL once, but I don't have it handy right now. Anyway, the point is that it's not very surprising that he recycled an existing name for his stuff. And look at that MM_openBrWindow() function. It's not exactly a difficult function, now is it?
Some opensource success stories (Score:1)
Well, the Internet for one. Wouldn't really exist or work that well without BIND (opensource), Sendmail (the killer app, opensource), NCSA httpd and mosaic (the next killer app, you know, all that "web enabled" stuff).
OpenSource has more then a few times created new markets, like UNIX (if bell hadn't shipped source code around no-one would have improved it much and it would have stagnated). Like the Internet, imagine if we were stuck trying to use protocols like DECNET to try and network a few hundred million machines together. Like all these nifty information transfer protocols such as email, www, and so on.
AES is another good source, the development was done as an open call, everything had to be out in public, license free so it could be widely adopted if it won, etc. DES on the other hand was developed by IBM (as a 128 bit originally) and later gutted by the NSA to 56 bits, as well as having the S-boxes modified (making them stronger we are told...). This time around AES is done completely out in the open and people have a lot more trust in the process, and the resulting algorithm. AES is going to be encrypting data communications from money transfers to your network traffic for the next 20-40 years, a decidedly non trivial responsibility.
The license itself (Score:1)
I would personally look at things like the license itself and the maturity of the package.
Is this a project that has been worked on for years? Or did the author(s) abandoned it when they graduated college?
Is the project well documented?
Is there a network of users in place to help newcomers? Does it have one or more popular web message boards or newsgroups that you can go to look for help?
How hard is it to find a guru to consult for you to help bring in the project into your organization?
That's all I can come up with now.
Recommended info (Score:1)
Heh (Score:1)
Advantage: no royalties (Score:1)
As an example, we were initially intending to offer our product with MS SQL Server. We started looking at the numbers and were really disheartened when we realized that at the price we were selling our product, we were making more money for Microsoft than ourselves!
We then started looking for a SQL Server replacement and found that both Borland InterBase and Postgresql were excellent products. Now we use so much open source software that we are at the point where our clients don't have to purchase any software, and since our product has been rewritten in Java, we don't even require windows anymore.
BTM
For dummies? (Score:2)
:)
C//
Some useful references (Score:1)
You'll need to discuss at least two situations: (1) using open source software in your business, and (2) developing/modifying open source software. Obviously, the issues are different.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Score:2)
link: [tuxedo.org]
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-b
At least it was exactly this paper which has converted me some years ago...
Open Source Reader and other Material (Score:1)
To streamline the readings I have put together a compilation of the key Open Source writings. I call this 80-page book The Open Source Reader (OSR) [csaszar.org]. The OSR is important because it puts into one point the entire key concepts and views. This is good material that is currently disperse across the net. The OSR has been a success for the students and has been downloaded thousands of times from people all around the world.
Regarding the contents of the Open Source class for managers, I put:
I have also taught the course in a Master of Computer Science; there the students develop an eBusiness project that must use only Open Source software. As an additional research project, every student must present Open Source software that may be useful for the rest of the class.
The feedback of teaching OS in the university has been excellent. Every future manager that crosses this class ends knowing that they can:
I am sure that the classrooms (schools, technical institutes, universities) are a key place to plant the seed of the Open Source.
Thanks (Score:1)
TMJ
p.s. There always seems to be some one who thinks that every person who submits an Ask Slashdot post should be satisfied with whatever they find on Google. Why is that? I guess if we are asking the Slashdot crowd we want to know what Slashdot thinks about the subject, not just what Google is kind enough to throw our way.