Leveraging the Work of Others
Recently one of the darlings of Web 2.0 called Twitter has been suffering from growing pains which many attribute to issues coping with it’s own popularity.
The guys at Twitter have been open and up-front about their problems, and one thing has come to light, they’ve failed to make full use of one of the greatest resources available in software development; Open Source Software.
Twitter isn’t alone, many other startups are only making use of OSS at the most basic levels by using Linux, the apache web server, PostgreSQL or MySQL, and a language with a free implementation (such as PHP or Java), without looking further to utilising technologies such as Hibernate, ActiveMQ, and YUI.
Hopefully the next generation of startups will learn that by making use of the work of others to reduce their costs, staffing requirements, and development times whilst improving their ability to scale with their popularity.