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Open source revolution at Sony

Sony seems to be embracing open source across the board -- in phones, in e-books, even in film.
Written by Dana Blankenhorn, Inactive

Sony is quietly pushing forward with a minor revolution, based on open source, across its product divisions.

Since becoming a conglomerate in the 1990s Sony has been managed as a collection of fiefdoms, not a coherent whole. Yet many of those fiefdoms now seem headed in the same direction.

Under Akio Morita, who resigned as chairman in 1994 and died in 1999, Sony was a lot like Steve Job's Apple -- iconoclastic, entrepreneurial, proprietary, secretive. These moves indicate the company is now headed in the opposite direction.

It's easy to say that Howard Stringer, the former CBS head who has been chairman of Sony since 2005, is behind a grand turn toward open source. Interesting if true. But the who is not nearly as important here as the what.

The what seems to be an attempt by Sony to regain market share by embracing open source across the board. Anyone ready to root for the Japanese?

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