Crowdsourcing Software Development to the Masses 122
Lucas123 writes "Computer World is running a piece on Crowdsourcing. That's a catchy term for the practice of taking a job traditionally performed by employees or a contracted company and outsourcing it to an undefined, large group of people in the form of an open call on the Web. Article author Mary Brandel views it as a viable way to develop cheap but innovative software. Sites like TopCoder and their coding competitions are becoming more popular with big name companies like Constellation Energy because programmers who take on the job are global, offering many different perspectives on any one job. 'The creativity and innovation of how people are rationalizing these designs and building components enables us to interject a perspective and approach that normally we wouldn't have access to,' Constellation's director of IT said." Is there any potential here, or is this just a buzzword bad idea?
even outside programming, it's usually a scam (Score:5, Informative)
For a good early example of the opposite, recall the CDDB fiasco---lots of people submitting data that ends up owned by someone who won't let you use it except under onerous licensing terms. The rise of "Web 2.0" has basically taken CDDB-style business models and made them much more common, so it's important to make sure you aren't enabling that sort of thing that in the long term ends up working directly against your interests.
Re:I call it... Let's not pay people... (Score:1, Informative)