Open Source and Privacy Can Co-exist and Thrive!

From ZDNet: "Google’s role in an open source world by ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn -- Google proves you can scale an enormous company in a short time, share code extensively (under a variety of licenses), yet still keep what you need to have private, private."

While I'm blogging about this over two months after it was posted (blasphemy!), Blankenhorn's point is worth remembering: open source and the sharing of information is not the death of corporate privacy. We can debate what should be kept private (and indeed we have on Hearsay Culture (see the interview with Prof. Frank Pasquale of Seton Hall Law School, discussing search engines)), but entities can thrive while sharing vast amounts of information. Does Google's economy of scale render this example marginal? I respond: how did Google grow, and where is it headed? Does anyone doubt that it will continue to grow under this model?

There are some limits to sharing and what Chesbrough calls "open innovation" (see my recent interview with Prof. Henry Chesbrough of U.C. Berkeley -- Haas School of Business), but Google's efforts are worth noting as we face increasing efforts to tighten IP controls.