July 1, 2008 8:36 AM PDT
You know open source has arrived when...J&J hires Drupal developers
As noted on its site, Johnson & Johnson is advertising a job opening for a Drupal developer:
The Manager will engineer web and web 2.0 hosting platforms that meet the enterprise needs at J&J. The Manager will design platforms that are comprehensive enough to meet 80% of the needs, but flexible enough to adapt to the needs of the other 20%....The incumbent will stay current with developments in the open source community, identify new platforms and or modules that bring value to J&J along with conducting R&D work by installing, configuring, modifying, and testing existing Drupal modules.
The job description is a bit remarkable in the savvy it demonstrates for open-source innovation: Johnson & Johnson doesn't need a "100 percent solution." Such things don't exist, whatever your vendor may tell you. Johnson & Johnson instead is looking for an innovation platform that gets it 80 percent of the way to a complete solution, with the flexibility to enable that remaining 20 percent.
This is intelligent development, and intelligent hiring. Johnson & Johnson clearly has some experience with open source. It's about to get more.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
