Paul Graham wrote about what business can learn from Open Source a while ago. He does not talk about Apache or Linux or Firefox, but principles common to open source software, and how they affect business. He takes blogging and opensource together and lists down common values that make a lot of sense from business view point.
He says:
I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like. Well, that’s news to no one. So how can I claim business has to learn it? When I say business doesn’t know this, I mean the structure of business doesn’t reflect it.
Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. It has an English cousin, travail, and what it means is torture.
This proves something a lot of us have suspected. The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.
Open source and blogging show us things don’t have to work that way. Ideas and even the enforcement of quality can flow bottom-up. And in both cases the results are not merely acceptable, but better. For example, open source software is more reliable precisely because it’s open source; anyone can find mistakes.
Anybody who’s in business, this article is worth a read.