Paul Graham in 2005, from a talk in Oscon : 'What Business Can Learn from Open Source'

I didn't know Paul Graham was pretty vocal 20 years ago (or that y combinator is that old) but this is article is neat and could definitely benefit some updates on what's seen on Bitcoin, Nostr, TBD, AT in recent times. Some snippets of the articles :

"Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers."

"I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like."

"Users don't switch from Explorer to Firefox because they want to hack the source. They switch because it's a better browser. It's not that Microsoft isn't trying. They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free."

"Most articles in the print media are boring. For example, the president notices that a majority of voters now think invading Iraq was a mistake, so he makes an address to the nation to drum up support. Where is the man bites dog in that? I didn't hear the speech, but I could probably tell you exactly what he said. A speech like that is, in the most literal sense, not news: there is nothing new in it."

"The average office is a miserable place to get work done"

"The problem with the facetime model is not just that it's demoralizing, but that the people pretending to work interrupt the ones actually working."

"Open source work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff prevails. It's the principle of a market economy. Ironically, though open source are done for free, those worlds resemble market economies, while most companies, for all their talk about the value of free markets, are run internally like communist states."

[in summary] three big lessons open source and blogging have to teach business:

(1) that people work harder on stuff they like,

(2) that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and

(3) that bottom-up often works better than top-down.