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The Future of American Industry Depends on Open Source Tech


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Credit: Elena Lacey / Wired

Kevin Xu is an investor and advisor of open source startups at OSS Capital, and served in the Obama White House. Jordan Schneider is the host of the ChinaTalk podcast, posted on Lawfare.

Open source has two important, and somewhat counterintuitive, advantages: speed and security.

These practices lead to faster technological developments, because a built-in global community of developers help them mature, especially if the technology is solving a real problem. Top engineers also prefer to work with and on open source projects. Wrongly cast as secretive automatons, they are more often like artists, who prefer to learn, work, collaborate, and showcase what they've built in public, even when they are barely compensated for that work.

From Wired
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