"Wikinomics" on Boeing and GNU

[Akira Urushibata]

"Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" is a book by Don
Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.  It came out in 2006.

In short the book says that the mass collaboration which makes Wikipedia
possible is applied more and more in industry.  The authors claim that
the new development model makes significant cost savings possible.

As we know, Wikipedia received two vital inputs from the free software
movement.  First, the site uses free software extensively.  Second,
free software projects illustrated the merits of mass collaboration and
laid down the basic ethos and rules.

A whole chapter of "Wikinomics" (if I recall correctly) is devoted to
Boeing and its development of the model 787 "Dreamliner" jet plane.
When two 787-Max planes crashed and 345 lives were lost in 2018 and 2019
Boeing was criticized for putting profits above safety.  These accidents
changed my attitude toward the book and its sequel: "Macro-Wikinomics."
I now feel that the authors were overly optimistic and failed to
examine the negative side of their subject matter.

With the most recent 737-Max incident Boeing's corporate culture has
again come under scrutiny.

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What does "Wikinomics" say about GNU?  It says nothing.  There is no
mention of GNU anywhere.  It does mention that Finnish student Linus
Torvalds made a simple version of the UNIX operating system.  As we
here all know, this description is not accurate.  We can see this as
evidence of the shallowness of the research which went into the book.
All this is unfortunate for the book is so widely known.