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Harvard Adds Open Source to its MBA Curriculum
mjasay writes to tell us that Harvard has started teaching open source to its aspiring MBA candidates. In the latest issue of Harvard Business Review, Harvard presents business managers with a tough decision: To open source a successful (but increasingly vulnerable) product or guard its intellectual property zealously? As the case study's open source proponent suggests, "Open source is like a rising tide. You either float with it or drown."
The title here is pretty misleading. It reads as if an entire course was dedicated to the issues of Open Source, which would be a good thing. As it is, this is just one case study. If used in a course, it would be read and used in one class session.
These case studies are used in lots of MBA courses, and they are just little stories used to describe a business situation. They often have interesting business problems but they're also often filled with fluff ("Jane showed up at the factory with her DK shoes and her Gucci handbag... can't figure out why the client doesn't take her seriously") and tons of information that is irrelevant to the "problem". I'm sure part of the "training" from these case studies is learning to weed out useless information.
For example, we had one about Eli Lilly and whether they should build a line dedicated to a particular product or use a general purpose/configurable line. The dedicated line had a higher throughput and lower cost but the configurable line could be used for something else if the market didn't develop for the drug. But it would be quite a stretch to say that because we read and discussed a 10 page case study that "Pharmaceuticals" had been added to our curriculum.
The type of course that would have this case study on the syllabus would also have cases on motorcycle parts manufacturing, consultancy woes, and HR problems where people don't work well together. But this is hardly a serious curriculum about Open Source.
It's worse than that.
The Zimbra Public License requires that the code displays the Zimbra logo. Yahoo's acquisition would mean that the trademark was owned by MS - allowing MS to exercise complete proprietary control over Zimbra code - and effectively nullify any user freedoms granted by the license.