Accesability

If everyone was able to pick up a steam engine for $2, take it home, and do whatever they want with it, we'd have discovered locomotives a lot quicker. Openness and accessibility breed invention. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates started their careers in technology 'hacking' computers in their garages. Opening the source for a program allows people to create their own add-ons and extensions to round out the application with new and intuitive functionality.

In 1876, William Sealy Gosset was working for Guinness Brewing Company when he discovered the t-student distribution in statistics. He asked for permission to publish his findings, but was rejected because Guinness claimed it was 'proprietary knowledge'. He later published his findings anyways under the pseudonym "student", and changed the history of the field of statistics. I don't claim to know an awful lot about the field or the history, but these people do, and they seem to like him well enough:

We might hazard the guess that the generously connective Gosset was, in part the catalyst, but perhaps more generally the communicating medium, of the great statistical surge of the English 1930's.


Many companies have already jumped on the open-source bandwagon, and use the software at all levels of their organizations (although, there are still reservations). However, there is another business model that has come up in class. The best part about it is it's free. Companies have known for a while that they can sell a product by giving it away for free. However, when it comes to technology, there's another spin on the free-product model. Companies like Google and Apple open up their products and give away the tools to develop on them for free, because they want people to generate content for it, and to have people experiment with the technology. I'm curious as to whether or not there are any companies that try this with hardware, or other physical products. I'll keep an eye out for them, but I haven't found any yet. Is it because giving away a physical product doesn't bring in enough user generated results to cover the costs? What do you all think?