Portland, OR: You may not think of yourself as an open-source software user, but if your business has any kind of a Web presence, you owe thanks to open source. That was one of the messages that Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, delivered at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), in his keynote speech, “The Clothesline Paradox: How Sharing Economies Create Value.”
In particular, O’Reilly said that open-source software creates great value for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs). “An economy is an ecosystem,” O’Reilly said. “If you take more out than you put in, the economy fails,” citing such infamous figures as Bernard “Bernie” Madoff and Charles Ponzi. Still others, such as Internet and open-source pioneers as Vint Cerf, Linus Torvalds, and Dennis Ritchie, understood that “We all do better when we all do better.”