Beware open source. Just ask AOL. All it wanted in the late 1990s was a killer browser to destroy Microsoft's Internet Explorer. They figured the best way of getting this was to make Netscape open source. Four long years later, AOL finally got what it wanted, just about, but the world had changed almost beyond recognition. Internet Explorer was dominant; the game was over.
In those four years the open source guys had entirely rebuilt Netscape from the ground up, defining technical standards still in use today. They built a world-class bug filing system too. The trouble is that AOL really, really needed a killer browser as quickly as possible. If ithad received it, computing history as we know it today might be very different.

...





_ More...