Open Source: it's the community, stupid!

while wars will continue to rage about business models and licensing issues around open source, the diamond in the rough in the open source movement is the robust community of software developers and testers around the world. The "sourcies" credo is exemplified by this post from "Brian" in 2003

Shirish Netke of Aztec Software in his Sandhill column describes some more of how this community is evolving. While most offshore firms focus on corporate IT development/maintenance, Aztec focuses on product development companies (software, other ip) so tends to be somewhat more cutting-edge. For someone like me constantly looking for IT labor productivity, this is really encouraging. Imagine the potential of harnessing global labor pools (not all of which directly work for an organized vendor like Accenture or a TCS or an Oracle), at different price points and different time zones in to software development, testing and maintenance cycles. Add to that the Jetblue model of leveraging at-home staff and we could be on the cusp of some fascinating developments in IT and other white collar labor productivity. Shai Agassi of SAP should be counting on some of this community as SAP rolls out its 5,000+ web services entry points into its transaction engines.