Teaching Open Source to Harvard Students

Harvard Business School and other major Universities are beginning to add open source into the curriculum. This is a sign that open source is starting to get the attention of many in the business world and curriculum's are adjusting to address this shift. In the April 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review we see a fictional case study involving the decision process required to decide whether or not a company should embrace open source business model or keep their software closed.

In the case study, "Open Source: Salvation or Suicide," fictional characters "Evan" tries to persuade "Marty" that her software "Amp Up" will become much more successful if she went to an open source model rather than keeping her solution proprietary.

The backdrop of the story shows that Marty's software is losing ground to new open alternatives that emulate what her software can accomplish.

...[Marty] challenged [Evan] to come out with it: What could be wrong with the company's so-far highly successful strategy of jealously guarding its intellectual property? Why should she open the software in Amp Up, as he had so casually suggested on the phone? Why should she invite the open-source community into the company vault, so to speak, and allow it to play with the crown jewels? on open-source software....

"Marty, these guys aren't going away. The point is, it's no longer just individuals hacking into your hardware and software or making game controllers of their own or writing code for themselves and their friends. It's companies now, too. Companies with real money behind them. These people are passionate about the user community that you created four years ago by bringing Amp Up into the world. And they're just as passionate about the idea that the user and developer communities should be based on open source, with developers being able to freely swap and write software to fashion applications as they see fit."

....

The study addresses some real challenges faced by many software companies today. That is how to deal with competitors that are giving away their product. Open source has really revolutionized the way software is developed and how money is made with software development today.

To be successful in the software business today students will need to understand the dynamics of open source, its various licensing options, its opportunities, and drawbacks.

The community aspect of open source movement is a powerful one. A community managed correctly has been shown to be more powerful than any single organization. Open source development hinges on community interactions based on trust and respect.

The case study goes on to correctly imply creating a business on open source is not easy. There have been a few success stories to date (Redhat, MySQL, Suse) but as more students start understanding the concepts and how it relates to business we'll start to see more and more people making money from open source projects. My feeling is that future startups will begin using hybrid approaches that incorporate the advantages of open source software with the advantages of proprietary systems.

Skooliki
http://outervillage.com
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