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May 11, 2005

The Jambo Supply Chain

The project had hit a roadblock, and now Mark was waiting on a bug fix. Maybe some random kid in Russia was fixing the defect. Or some guy in Bangalore, working in his off hours, had decided to address the issue. Whatever the case, Jambo had found a problem with our supplier's software and now we were waiting on that supplier to deliver the goods. But in this case, we had never met our "supplier". In fact, we didn't even know who our supplier was. We didn't know WHERE our supplier was. Welcome to the world of open source.

I began thinking about our supply chain for this software manufacturing business we call jambo. We had many layers of software below us: linux, mysql, java, tomcat... all of these were critical to our product. The developers of these wares are our partners, or more accurately, Jambo suppliers - and yet, no money changes hands. We've never met these partners.

Living so close to the bleeding edge of new technology, we interact with many of these individuals electronically - asking them to fix defects that we find, which hamper our business. They are very responsive. We may even go in and fix the defect ourselves, contributing to the open source community when we can. What an amazing FUNDAMENTAL shift this is in in the software development model, I'm so glad to be a part of it.

Posted by Jim at May 11, 2005 12:48 PM

Comments

Posted by: Danny at May 11, 2005 03:36 PM