Dear Australia: Software Knows No Borders

from the yeah,-that'll-work dept

Ross Lazarus points us to the rather surprising news that an increasing number of Sun MySQL employees have been barred from entering Australia on short-term business visas, due to the worry that they'll somehow "compete" with local businesses. There certainly may be more to this story, but on the face of it, it seems pretty ridiculous. Preventing employees of a certain company from entering your country may (barely) have made sense in the past and in some specific industries, but with software on today's internet, it's positively laughable. Somehow I doubt that the "local" Australian database developer community is resting easier thanks to their country's border patrol safely keeping MySQL employees abroad.

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Overhype

by Mike Masnick

Wed, Sep 24th 2008 11:12pm

MBAs Being Taught To Fight Open Source By Offering Closed Source Alternatives?

from the get-a-refund dept

The Slashdot crowd is reasonably up in arms of a paper jointly written by a Harvard Business School professor and a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor on ways to compete with open source competitors. Amusingly, nowhere in the paper does it suggest that one of those strategies might be to go open source yourself, embracing the actual benefits of openness and infinite goods, and focusing on better business models involving scarce goods. In fact, it doesn't even seem like the paper recognizes the rather large businesses created around open source software, with the totally false implication being that open source isn't a business, but a hobby. Frankly, the whole thing gives MBAs a bad name, by suggesting that they're not being taught to actually understand how open source can be used within a business model. That's unfortunate, because it's simply not true -- at least at some schools. Much of my own journey down the path in exploring the economics of infinite goods started thanks to my own MBA professor Alan McAdams at Cornell, who was teaching how important open source models were to the success of the internet and businesses back when I first took his class in 1996 or 1997.

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