Scott Merrill over at TechCrunch recently pondered aloud “Can Startups Learn Anything From Linux?”

He, and we, answer with an empathic “yes”.

It is indeed axiomatic that collaboration is a good thing, but it really is true in practice. If two heads are better than one, than 2,000 or 20,000 has to be that much better. Of cource, there is a law of diminishing returns and too many cooks can spoil the broth, but that is why great open source projects have various hierarchies where certain people are allowed to do certain things. And, a benevolent dictator – a la Linus Torvalds –  is part of the equation.

But we can all agree with Ubuntu’s Allison Randal and the Linux Foundation’s Jim Zemlin, both quoted in Merrill’s piece, that free and open is a superior development model.

To answer the article’s title question directly, however, we need to consider the type of startup.  As Merrill points out: “If there’s some home-grown technology that helps your startup but isn’t fundamental to its success, why not release it in order to leverage the global body of free software developers?”

Does what works so well in software translate to other types of companies? What could, say, a start-up manufacturer of baby strollers learn from Linux? If someone comes up with safer restraints, should that be shared with the entire industry, while holding back on other things (an easier folding mechanism, for example) as competitive differentiators? Hard to say.

But there is no question that if you’re in software, free and open is the way to go. Better development leads to better software, which is good for customers. And what’s good for customers HAS to be good for business.