Secret Sauce

The vast majority of businesses particularly in the Western World had up until now believed that having a "Secret Sauce" was the true way to sustain and grow business. And hence safeguarding "Intellectual Property" and stretching the "mileage" gained from a single idea, seemed to corrupt even the brilliant minds like that of Edison.

I had known that Edison was as shrewd a businessmen, as he was a technical innovator, but while listening to this wonderful talk from Johnathan about FOSS at the OSBC conference, I learnt about how he tried to stifle the adoption of "AC" during the mass electrification process, simply because he liked "DC" more than "AC".

In one of my talks in 2003, I had touched upon the concept of "Open source" and how most cusines were rendered rich in variety and quality because of their receipe's being open source.

In this talk Johnathan goes on to show how standardization and "openness" has helped almost all industries in the past from Canals, Rails, Electricity and Telecommunication, and its quite but a natural course in the evolution of any industry to adopt openness and standardization. This idea is very elementary, and it pains to see that "Corporates" with their greed for material gains, have tried many roadblocks to delay such standardization. Most do not even participate in trying to achieve normative standards for the benefit of a bigger and better cause.

However, I am pleased to know leaders like Johnathan have not only realized that "Community Models" are the way to succeed in adding value to the goods/services sold, but are also advocating and are being vocal to speed its adoption.