Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work

A Final Word

In the 1990s, a remarkable software product emerged onto

the corporate computing landscape and met with surprising

acceptance. The product arose, not from a known and trusted

company, but from a loosely affiliated army of programmers

coordinating their work across the Internet. Remarkably, they

all worked on the project without pay.

We refer, of course, to the Linux operating system, which

continues to pose a serious threat to some of behemoth

Microsoft’s favorite money products. Linux has achieved a high

degree of penetration into corporate markets, and is widely

viewed as more reliable and secure than equivalent products

from the world’