One area that appears to make sense for incubators is open source software development.

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This situation sounds improbable, but it's how open source software development takes place.

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"The dramatic growth of open source software development can now be seen in internet-based, always-connected mobile and consumer products, " said Tom Lantzsch, executive officer, Linaro.

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"ARM and our partners have a long history of working with, and supporting, open source software development for complex SoCs based on the ARM architecture, " said Warren East, ARM CEO.

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As Mr Montgomery points out, there are two ways of thinking about open-source software development.

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So we're trying to use open-source software development ideas to take the tools we've developed internally and make them publicly available.

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The use of open source in software development has demonstrated that, at least in some industries, open developers can effectively compete against industrial giants.

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Citrix, one of the primary cloud vendors, has discontinued contributing software projects to OpenStack, the open-source software foundation for cloud development, of which it had been one of the founding partners.

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With publicly hosted open source software, social media feeds of on-going development and an active community mailing list and live chat, developers have easy access to support and exchange of ideas.

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Open-source development relies on a loose-knit federation of programmers who work to improve the software as a labor of love.

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