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Open Source About the People
An anonymous reader writes "InfoWorld has a nice look at what defines an open source venture. It seems that the main area of interest, and difficulty, rests with the personnel surrounding the project. From the article: 'But the muddier waters are around the personalities and commitment of the engineers who created the code. How long do they intend to stay? What is their level of commitment? These are fuzzy types of questions - but we know from history that when the core team of engineers that best understands the code up and walks out ... it tends to send a company into a death spiral.'"
After finding the article and reading it this is what it really seems to say: open source is great, since so many more people understand your code you are that much cheaper to fire after you have done the creative work and replace with someone cheaper. I love open source, but if companies are really thinking like this it would be a good reason to make your projects closed source, as sad as that sounds.
Philosophy.
Of course the people are key to any business, not just software, and not just open source. A large part of building a sustainable business is to solve this problem and build structures that survive change. Sustainable software is built in layers so that no single team determines the life of the whole. Individual projects will die if their key developers leave but the whole can keep running.
The article seems mainly aimed at VCs involved in the new boom in Silicon Valley - open source - and is warning them, "buy the developers, not the software".
Good advice but hardly profound.
My blog
Perhaps I'm cynical, but it's my experience that companies don't want to think of any of their employees as anythng but resources. That makes dealing with them so much easier - if you think of them as people, you might actually feel a little empathy or even guilt when you make them redundant just to make a small cost saving, or refuse bonuses and pay rises while the senior management award themselves both.
I don't think it's any kind of coincidence that "Personnel" departments all got renamed to "Human Resources".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
"The code without the people is worth nothing," according to Phillipe Cases, partner at VC firm Partech International. "A million lines of code is like a million problems that you have to solve. So the risk on any open source investment project is that the 2-3 guys that created it and maintain it could leave. The commitment of the developers is often the IP -- not the code itself."
I don't think this is unique to open source... or software development in general. Of course, once VC is involved we're not talking about FOSS in the *strictest* sense - these guys want to make money. Ok, it may be that the revenue stems from support, but that's the same for nearly *all* software projects. (No, I don't mean just fixing bugs - that's a flawed business model to start with... Oh, wait)
Just to give an example - and to prove the quote above from TFA is wrong (sometimes, anyway):
Back in the early 80's I was asked to look at a program which required some adjustments. It was written in FORTRAN and it was a *mess*! "Spaghetti code" didn't even begin to describe it - it had GOTOs to GOTOs, looped out code, redundant variables by the dozen - you name it, it had it. It didn't have anything in the way of provenance. It took me two days to trace out how to implement a trivial change. The weirdest thing was there was no way I could really document what I'd done because that would need a framework - and there wasn't one. And, you know what? The company didn't care. They had paid a junior programmer for two days to implement something they needed RIGHT NOW. They didn't need to keep on the original developers (and God knows how many preceded me), nor did they need to insist on adequate documentation. If they needed to make a change in the future, they would just do the same (albeit with a younger and cheaper programmer). They wouldn't employ me to look at it - I'm too expensive.
My point is that it isn't the software that gets too expensive - it's the developers themselves. Who among us hasn't used a project to enhance their Kudos and desirability in the market?
So VC's are looking at FOSS in the wrong way. We don't really do it for money (though that's nice), we do it for the satisfaction of getting it right and being able to point to something and say "I did/helped_with that".
Anyone disagree?
(Ducks)
Let's get beyond the simple binary 'all closed source is bad for customers/users, all open source is good". In an ideal world yes, but open source developers as people have many of the same motivations as closed source developers and the reason they leave a project may be similar - they might be bored with what they are doing, get a better job offer somewhere else, and *not support the software any more*.
/resources to do anything themselves. Just look at sourceforge and see the number of dead projects.
The open source code might *potentially* be resurrected by other developers, but it might not. Leaving customers/ users just as stranded as if it was a closed source project, particularly smaller users who do not have the money
I've had my share of both.
I've been working for a large German corporation where I was supposed to develop software. Mostly I developed reports, but that's a different matter.
Schedules were tight, burnout was running rampart and in the 9 months I worked there, the AVERAGE stay time for a team member was about 3-4 months. With one month being the time necessary to give the person an idea of what the heck's going on in the (very badly written) code.
That's closed source, ladies and gentlemen.
It can be the same with open source. With a few very interesting differences.
With OS, it's no problem to give your applicants the code instead of having to wait 'til you decided for one of them. There is no NDA to sign. You can already base your interview on the question "did they understand the code?". You start with a team member that already knows the basics of your code and knows what is going to come. He already knows if he WANTS the job, since he knows what kind of beast he's going to be pitted against.
The average stay time will be first of all longer, and more importantly, your new team member has a head start. He already knows the basics of the code, he is getting productive in less time.
That's open source, ladies and gentlemen.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I think both you and grandparent are mostly right. But I think he is mistaken when he says
"They've developed a way to keep the developer a cheap, replaceable asset."
A company may be able to keep the wages down by simply refusing to acknowledge good developers, and get away with this for a while. But when the frustrated developers eventually leave anyway, management will notice that the "replaceable" is not always so easy.
Posting anonymously today because the topic might become hot at my current place of work - I'm thinking of putting out my own resume if things don't change soon.
From N3P:
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The future will show a great demand for individuals that have the ability to implement necessary changes. They should be entrepreneurs, fluent in new technology, project management and marketing. They also should excel in sales and development of new products and businesses. N3P identifies them as "Project Entreprenerus".
Most of our students will form their own business before graduating, and it is our expectation that many will be very successful.