Ears Wide Open

As the company has grown, Slim's leaders have learned exactly what the founders of Mozilla Web browser discovered: If you're going to have a grown-up company, with a competitive product in the marketplace, you need a staff of paid full-time employees. They make it possible to meet deadlines and run reliably. Some things have to be handled by staff--such as quality control for the physical product. And, of course, you can get paid staffers to do what the volunteers pass up or abandon midway. "We think of our development community as this big game room, this big playpen, and we're watching," says Cosson. "If the community can elevate an idea and get it over the hump, that's great. But sometimes we have to rewrite software to finish it." Slim now employs 26 people.

The company's open-source model will increasingly be tested as it grows and matures. Already, Slim's top contributors detect changes in the tenor of the online forums that have been so effective. "The community has grown wildly in the last couple of years," says Kevin Deane-Freeman, who makes his living as a hardware designer for a printer manufacturer near Vancouver, British Columbia. For several years, he has often spent his lunch break working on software for Slim. "It's no longer possible to keep up with it 100%, nor to make everyone happy. That's a big thing when much of why you do it is to see others happy with what you have provided."

With Slim's full-time staff increasing, there's also a danger that the intellectual center of gravity will shift to the inside. In the past, Blackketter says, "the vast majority of our technical discussions, inside and out," took place on Slim's online forums, "where you wouldn't be able to tell who is an employee and who isn't." Now, Adrian Smith warns, "as the employee team has grown, there are more conversations going on in private."

How Slim manages this phase will determine whether it can be more than just a startup that briefly thrived on the open-source model. "With the open organization, the real question is: Can it scale?" says Ram Charan, the prominent management consultant. Open-source software projects often reach a "forking" point where the community splinters and factions go their different ways. And while the open-source approach offers a nearly limitless resource potential, "that same potential can introduce an unpredictability," says Deane-Freeman, who signs his postings "not a Slim Devices employee" because of confusion that arose from his frequent and authoritative contributions. "In a larger structure, and especially with a publicly traded company, predictability plays a strong role." Indeed, Slim's unconventional, open style may prove challenging for Logitech International, which announced in October that it had acquired the company for $20 million. Logitech promised that Slim would remain autonomous, enthusing over "one of [its] key assets, a committed community of developers." But you still have to wonder whether Logitech merely covets Slim Devices for its cool audio technology--and whether, ultimately, it will kill off the more valuable invention.