Essay About Free Application Use And Free Publication Of Personal Improvements

Mozilla Firefox
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In todays fast moving world it is important for every company to keep up with the pace of change and be
innovative. This job can not be done by just a few people within the company. However companies need
the help of everyone, especially the costumers, since they are the one who have the needs and buy or do not
buy the product in the end.
Useful knowledge is wide spread and hard to get. One possible avenue to collect as many new ideas
and suggestions as possible – is to use the concept of Open Innovation. Open Innovations connect external
ideas with the knowledge of the internal Research and Development division of a company (Chesbrough,
2003). It is difficult and costly to fully understand the costumers. Open Innovations give the companies a
chance to let their customers participate in their innovation process (Thomke & von Hippel, 2002).
Open Source is one of the most controversial phenomena of IT-industry nowadays. Confrontation
of its supporters and opponents is perhaps the most noticeable trend in the soft world recent years. And it is
not surprising because as soon as someone starts to speak about Open Source, the rest remember Microsoft
and its products, which are common examples for proving inferiority and inadequacy of proprietary
software (i.e. programs with closed-source) (Sharma, Sugumaran, & Rajagopalan, 2002).
Open Source is a method of programs development and licensing, in which everyone is entitled to a
free application use or sale, a free modification (keeping the information about the authors of the programs
in the code), a free publication of personal improvements and free access to programs source code
(Mockus, Fielding, & Herbsleb, 2002).
In the following report, the authors are going to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using
an Open Source. They are going to link the Open Innovation concept to the Mozilla Firefox case. The
differences between different Internet browsers with regard to organizational and technical issues will be
another part in this report as well as the role of users as marketing agents and co-developers. The current
competitive