Udell's 500th, Open Source, outsourcing, and Brian Behlendorf

Jon Udell (who's taking a rest after his 500th blog post) did an excellent interview with Brian Behlendorf about (among other things) the conventional wisdom in business circles that software is something that can be built on spec by any software developer in the world.  Thankfully, Brian attacks that line of thinking in the context of open source software development, something he knows plenty about as a co-founder of the Apache Software Foundation and CollabNet:

One of the key insights of open source is that there are good reasons to attach people to code. Apache isn't just a Web server, it's a Web server with a community around it. To treat software like Legos, without thinking about the context and the community, is a losing proposition. There was a lot of noise a couple of years ago about building corporate component libraries. But the problem is that by simply having that code there, you didn't have the context. [full interview]

Brian also has a new blog.