Open Source Hypocrisy: Tag opensource

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).”

Fake Steve Tees Off

Spacemonkey — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 03:22:00 +0000

I’ve been using the excellent Vienna RSS reader for the majority of my time on this Mac, and have to admit that I’m just getting overrun with all the reading and simply cannot catch up. One such feed category that I stopped looking at was the Apple one, that had a bunch of interesting and entertaining feeds.

So I took a quick gander today just to see if I’d missed anything. Other than the whole Leopard launch (sorry, off limits until Digidesign updates ProTools, grr) there were not that many interesting items, but there were a few that made me chuckle.

One of which is the Diary of Fake Steve Jobs and I have to presume you’re not living under a rock and know of the site, famous for a comedic/parody of a guy openly saying he’s pretending to be Steve Jobs.

The first post to make me chortle was Stallman to Dvorak: Welcome to freedom, your rulebook is in the mail. This is penned as a parodied response to Dvorak’s recent column where he chastises Redmond for giving him so much frustration that he’s seriously considering switching operating systems.

NOTE: As proper punishment I’m not linking to John’s original article, as I do occasionally try to follow the age-old advice don’t feed the trolls .

Of course, the most entertaining aspect of this is how he also deftly pretends to be a father figure of open source, Richard Stallman, who writes an open letter to Dvorak giving him instructions on how to comply with his newfound freedom.

He (Fake Steve, that is) then takes it one step further with PJ to Dvorak: Please schedule a re-education course ASAP, panning another open source celebrity.

However the point he’s shrewdly trying to make – while making fun of his victims of course – is that there are some pretty extreme people hanging around the open source world and they have some less-than-tolerant views on those who don’t subscribe to the exact same views of theirs.

That is one of the things that led me to launch this site, in the hopes of bringing to light the alarming rapid separation of open source and free software ideologies. The open source folks are totally hip with the free software gang, however there have been repeated examples of how intolerant the free software folks can be toward other open source efforts – some of which have been chronicled on this very site (not that anyone other than my mom reads this site, that is).

I had to write this article as Fake Steve really hit that nail on the head, while not bashing open source he clearly targets the more extremist types.

When are these people going to realize that enforced freedom is an oxymoron?

Products and Open Source, Revisited

Spacemonkey — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:59:00 +0000

We’ve written before on the suspicion that products and open source software don’t mix all that well.

TechCrunch writes an article titled How Grey Is Your Valley: Making Money From Open Source where they question the motives of Matt Mullenweg.

Matt owns a company, and also is a lead contributor to an open source project. The issue stated by TechCrunch is that the main product provided by Matt’s company depends on the open source project – or more importantly, the lack of a competitor provided in the open source project.

There are some loud protests at the accusations, one of which titled TechCrunch Questions Matt Mullenweg’s Ethics at OpenSourceCommunity.org.

I remember several core developers on some open source projects I once contributed to coming under fire with the same allegations. While I defended them at the time – as my own understanding of the logic made sense, as the things that were turned into products were not multi-purpose and had deployment requirements that just didn’t fit being default – I cannot really defend Matt’s predicament as spam filtering to me seems like an obviously stock thing that needs to be done.

On the flip side, Akismet is more than a product, it is a service, and providing that service carries a cost. How can such a service be provided for free?

It is my belief that anyone that plays a major role on an open source project cannot really profit from that effort, lest they have thick enough skin to tolerate the backlash of accusations and so on. This isn’t new, folks.