Herds of cats

[Alex Martelli]

Nicola Musatti <nicola.musatti at gmail.com> wrote:
   ...
> > >Ah, the closed source days! Back then you could just buy the company
> > >and be done with it. Now you have to chase developers one by one all
> > >over the world... ;-)
> >                     .
> > You propellor-heads (I write that in all fondness, Nicola) are
> > all laughing, but I'm certain that the right elaboration of
> > that proposition could make it into the *Harvard Business Review*
> > (or *IBM Systems Journal*, which seems to have tilted irreversibly
> > in that direction).
> 
> I was only half joking, actually. Compare Python to Delphi. If a
> company wanted to acquire control over Delphi, they'd try and buy
> Borland; to acquire control over Python what are they to do? Well,
> hiring Guido and Alex is probably a step in the right direction ;-) but
> would it be enough? Programming languages are not the best example, but
> if you change it to Mozilla and Opera my argument makes more sense.

Not a bad point at all, although perhaps not entirely congruent to open
source: hiring key developers has always been a possibility (net of
non-compete agreements, but I'm told California doesn't like those).
E.g., Microsoft chose to hire Anders Hejlsberg away from Borland (to
develop J++, the WFC, and later C# and other key parts of dotNet) rather
than buying Borland and adapting Delphi; while acquiring companies is
often also a possibility (e.g., Novell chose to buy SuSE GmbH, rather
than trying to hire specific people off it, despite SuSE's roots in open
source and free software).


Alex