Hacking business model

Now at LinuxFest NW listening to John Locke's talk about the Hacking business model

John Locke is owner of Freelock Computing, a small business in Seattle who is concentrating his business around Drupal. (Drupal is a tool that allows you to quickly develop web sites). John is following many of the same principles that are described in the Hacking business model that Zak Greant and I created based on our experience with the early days of MySQL Ab. Back then we followed many of the principles, including shared copyright, but the principles were never clearly written down and was over time abolished/ignored by managers who didn't understand them.

John did actually get so inspired by our document that he came and visited me in Finland in March and spent several days discussing business models, open source, and how to keep ones employees happy. We also enjoyed some good food, "some" black vodka, sauna and rolling around in the snow naked.

Ralf Wahlsten and I also spent some time going through John's business and helped him focus on the right things to go forward. He now seems to be on track and if you are in the Seattle area and need some good people to develop or help develop your web infrastructure I recommend you to contact his company.

Monty Program Ab is following the Hacking business model to the letter and it will be interesting to see how things will work out. I will keep posting about this to let you know what works and what doesn't work and the challenges we face as we grow.

An interesting thing is that we get many(!) work applications based on the Hacking business model alone! People mail us and say that Monty Program Ab is the type of company they always dreamt on working for. If you are about to start a company based on open source ideals, I recommend you subscribed to our model; It seams to be a sure way to attract good talent!

If you already have a company that has a similar model, or are already following the hacking business model, let us know about it and comment about your experiences!

I will update the the Hacking business model with links to companies who are following our principles!