Changes

The model of starting a new business that delivers technological solution is quite similar to the model of operation adopted by the open source community. This involves tracking any issues that may arise and managing the source code. As such, one of the biggest assets of a new start-up company is their source code and the issues of their software solutions. Without them, the business will not be able to sustain itself in the market. As Mike Hoye states “If you are small and nimble, you can still pick your battles that make your opponent’s assets irrelevant”.

One of the many problems that plague a new start-up is trying to hide their ideas from big corporations. The reason for doing so is often individual wishes to protect their ideas and try to prevent corporations capitalizing on their ideas. This is one of the biggest mistakes that a new start-up can make as it is important that big corporations cannot ship a product that is bigger, better and fast due to research and budget approval which will usually take a year before a prototype is created. Therefore, it is highly important that the company ship a small percentage of the idea in the form of a product and then improve on them in the later versions. This way, the idea is out in the market for various users to test it out and improvements are made based on the feedback that we get. This process of developing a software product is similar to how the Linux distributions are made. A famous example is how the iPhones were launched. The initial iPhone excelled in only one feature, which is the multi-touch functionality. One the other hand, the general basic features are commonly available with other phones.

Another problem that often plagues a new technological start-up the developer tends to write a lot of program code. This is not advisable as most of those codes could already be written by someone else and may even be more efficient. This is always more financially and timely feasible than writing your own code, which will have bugs and will take time to fix. Being an open source business, program codes are usually not proprietary and the start-up company can often make use of them as long as those works are properly credited and appreciated. This is often accomplished through a social contract with the open source community. Open source code is a form of social contract and there is no licensing involved. As a common and appropriate thing in a social contract, the start-up company should give back to the community as well. By doing so, we can also build a good relationship with those individuals and can request their help when the time requires.

Mike Hoye closes of his presentation by summarizing the mistakes he made during his one year period and they are:

* <font> Late Marketing – This caused a problem as users are not aware of the existence of his product</font>