PegaSoft Canada White Paper
Draft - 2003
By Ken O. Burtch
Copyright © 2004, Ken O. Burtch. All Rights Reserved.
Permission given to copy (including printing and photocopying) this document
for education purposes provided this notice is kept intact.
IT companies today are fraught with poor organization, low reliability, isolated employees and corruption. Open source advocates hope to change how business is accomplished but often fall back on traditional business models because of lack of planning. This paper explores the well-understood failures of the North American IT departments, postulates on the sources of these failures, and creates a proposal on how to construct a company that is able to be organized, healthy and able to deal effectively with open source development. This is the model I propose for my own Linux company, PegaSoft Canada.
In the course of this paper, I will deal with issues including the problem of mendacity, the ineffectualness of hiring practices, the myths of traditional corporate structure, the nature of FUD in both the commercial software and open source communities, the challenges of spearheading free software projects and the hurdles facing Linux startups.
Section 1: The Fundamentals
Section 2: Mendacity in the Corporate World
Section 3: Mendacity in the Academia and the Church
Section 4: Mendacity in the IT Department
Section 5: Mendacity in the Open Source Movement
Section 6: Forming a Better Company
Bibliography