Paul Graham recently gave a keynote speech on Oscon 2005 (O’Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005 - Portland, Oregon). I listened to his talk via IT Conversations. Here is the link: Paul Graham - An OSCON 2005 Keynote.

Graham pointed out and discussed the three big lessons that business can learn from open source and blogging.
(1) People work harder on stuff they like.
(2) The standard office environment is very unproductive.
(3) Bottom-up often works better than top-down.

He also predicted that the old paternalistic employer-employee relationship may finally be ditched by the force underlying open source and blogging.

If you would like to read on this topic rather than listening. Here is the link: What Business Can Learn From Open Source (A Paul Graham’s essay that is derived from a talk at Oscon 2005.)

Paul Graham is the author of On Lisp, Ansi Common Lisp, and Hackers & Painters; was co-founder of Viaweb (now Yahoo Store); discovered a simple Bayesian spam filter that inspired many present filters; and is one of the partners in Y Combinator. He has a PhD in computer science from Harvard and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia in Florence.

This is my second post talking about Paul Graham. The first on is “Great Hackers According to Paul Graham.”