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Skwire Empire is a giant collection of programs written by DC member Skwire.

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Paul Graham's Essays - "What Business Can Learn from Open Source" and more

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From "What Business Can Learn from Open Source" (http://www.paulgraha....com/opensource.html)
...
The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff prevails.

Does this sound familiar? It's the principle of a market economy. 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.

There are two forces that together steer design: ideas about what to do next, and the enforcement of quality. In the channel era, both flowed down from the top. For example, newspaper editors assigned stories to reporters, then edited what they wrote.

Open source and blogging show us things don't have to work that way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up. And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better. For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because it's open source; anyone can find mistakes.
...


Paul Graham wrote a book called "Hackers and Painters" (http://www.paulgraham.com/hackpaint.html)
he publishes interesting essays online that might be worth a read.
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