Business and open source

Good piece from Paul Graham that connects amateurish enthusiasm with productivity, start-ups and open source software.

Choice quotes:

“At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.”

“Google is a rare example of a big company in tune with the forces I’ve described. They’ve tried hard to make their offices less sterile than the usual cube farm. They give employees who do great work large grants of stock to simulate the rewards of a startup. They even let hackers spend 20% of their time on their own projects.”

“Why not let people spend 100% of their time on their own projects, and instead of trying to approximate the value of what they create, give them the actual market value? Impossible? That is in fact what venture capitalists do.”

“One measure of the incompetence of newspapers is that so many still make you register to read stories. I have yet to find a blog so stupid they tried that.”

And my favourite:

“The basic idea behind office hours is that if you can’t make people work, you can at least prevent them from having fun.”