Open Source Hypocrisy: Managing Open Source Projects

Managing Open Source Projects

Spacemonkey — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:41:00 +0000

While browsing the Open Source Community blog I found a post by Amy Stephen about managing open source projects. Or more succinctly, what it takes to manage one, and who is/isn’t a good fit to manage such an effort, written by Matt Asay for c|net.

The original post is based on research published in the Academy of Management Journal on the topic. Ultimately open source projects need specific skills in growing and nurturing the project and the project community and that need gets more and more prevalent over time as the project evolves.

I’d like to add my personal view that these skills are most definitely not technical skills, and despite the popular notion that open source projects should be managed by elite alphageeks, they scream for an exact opposite personality to manage.

I’ve seen several projects run into the ground due to a few developers who, despite making major contributions to the code, had a complete lack of skills needed to manage a project. For the alphageeks out there:

"eleet skillz" != "competent management"

Looking around the open source world, there are actually many famous personalities that although being technically gifted with brilliance, they are also notorious for being, er, less than approachable.

I’ll end this post with the moneyquote from Matt:

“in other words, a jerk is a jerk, even if he/she writes great code. You may want them on the project, but you don’t want them running it (into the ground).”

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"Managing Open Source Projects" by Spacemonkey

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 22:49:27 +0000

I suppose we need to agree what “management” is ;-)

I think it is even more critical for new/small projects to have a “people person” on board not only to evangelize the technology but to recruit both geeks and community members. In my involvement with Mambo and Joomla, I’d say those were my biggest contributions to both projects: helping grow the community, trying to “convert” additional developers to the platform, promoting enthusiastic community members to help out on the forums and other non-technical stuff, etc.

Imagine a brand new project, with only two contributors. Both are fantastically gifted from the technical perspective, but suffer significant weakness on the “people skills” side of the equation. The project might take off anyway if the software were useful, however the ability (or inability) of the two founders will ultimately decide how successful the project will be, and not based on their technical merits either.

This project will have a slow start, even if their code is brilliant. Nobody will want to hang out when they are being told they aren’t smart enough, blah blah. So the code will have little community behind it, which is honestly what makes most open source projects tick in the first place.

I suppose some projects are successful regardless of the community – but that might be due to dominant market share, such as Apache.

However there is one exception that I can think of – qmail. Dan Bernstein did a great job with qmail, but his prickly “just shut up and do as I say, I’m smarter than you” demeanor significantly limited the adoption of qmail overall. qmail is still a successful project and is in use all over the Internet, but imagine if Dan had a more people-friendly personality, like Larry Wall, Dave Thomas or Guido van Rossum?

And remember we’re talking geeks here, so I don’t think you need to be David Lee Roth or anything, but cuddlier than a crocodile would be a good start…

"Managing Open Source Projects" by Graham Spice

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:08:21 +0000

I’ve been monitoring these trends in management styles from within the forums of large open source projects for over a decade….projects like osCommerce, phpBB and Mambo made for interesting observations. When I really got into the Mambo scene, I was astounded by the core team and their ability to work and communicate with the community as this was a stark difference from many other OS projects I’d been observing.

As large projects are passed down to new leaders we are now seeing how this management skills vs. coding skills debate plays out. Different styles in communication, focus, and manipulation (in a positive sense of that word) are easily apparent as these “leaders” of open source stumble or accelerate.

I’ve run a very small open source project of my own for a few years and I am not a good coder. I think this to be a hindrance for a small project like mine because I cannot effect much change. I did a good job promoting/marketing the project and it has a lot of users….but many are unsatisfied in the long-run as few upgrades or new features are released.

I am suggesting that this discussion applies only to large, established open source projects. Fledgling projects must to be started by the eleet squad and there is little initial need for “management” types. At what stage is it appropriate to bring them in?