All Hail the Community
July 25th, 2005 by Adam Cuothe
So the team over at Technology Evaluation Centers is running a series of articles on the community (in open source sense).
Labeled a disruptive technology, it’s changing the landscape of enterprise software development, distribution, and consumption. Open source software is grounded in the strength of its communities. This report and interview series examine how to engage and successfully maintain such communities.
I’d like to start by pointing out, the community, is kind of creepy. Everytime I read an article about Free or Open Source software, I see the community mentioned. Nowadays I can’t read that phrase without hearing some sort of dark and foreboding music in the background, like something out of an early black and white film. Or maybe it’s the chant of the circus freaks in Tod Browning’s aptly title film, Freaks, endlessly repeating “Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, We will make her one of us.”
Fortunately there is meaning behind this open source community. It’s not simply propaganda and that’s why I think this is an interesting read. Instead of just chanting over and over, the community, it attempts to explain what this community is and it does so with insight into how it’s changing things in the enterprise software industry. Something most community-chanting articles miss. Especially pertinent is at the end of the article, when the author points out how it’s the community that is the really significant thing about the whole open source software phenomenon. Things are changing, disrupting they say, so we’d better not pout, and we’d better not give naughty vendors the time of day when they tell us they’ll give us the source code under a non-disclosure agreement.
Read on for the next few days, he promises interviews with well-known community leaders Jeff Bates (from Slashdot), Karl Fogel (on the development end of things from the Subversion project), and Louis Suárez-Potts, who heads-up the OpenOffice.org project. All of whom, I’d expect have interesting points to make and the experience to back it up.
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