The Flatter Organizations and Broader Economic Webs of Open Source

<ed.note>Larry Augustin (slides 19 & 20) alludes to the fact that open source pureplay economics flatten the typical software vendor hierarchy. It disintermediates the C-Suite (What value do they provide? They're not generating code), denecessitates the sales layer (What value do they provide? People just google and download) and accentuates the developer community (What value do they provide? Nearly all. They're the only ones qualified to provide premium support, upgrades, bugfixes, etc.) At a time when mature software vendor market pressure increasingly offshores (by implication, downsalaries and thus downvalues) developer worth, the open aggregated, collaborative, distributed development model upgrades individual developer worth (coder superstars) and the firms that they spawn. Interestingly, the traditional software vendor clients have learned to winnow out, identify, and incent those supercoders to build allegiances to the software client organization.</ed.note>