How not to destroy your Open Source Community before it even exists.
Published by admin on Monday, June 7, 2010 - 00:08:42 - Filed under General, News, Announcements, Development
While being enthusiastic about Servoy’s announce that Servoy 5.2 will be Open Sourced (see my post on that subject), I really hope that they are going to do it right. What do I mean?
Most major Open Source software are backed up by companies who have interests in it (think of Eclipse and look at how IBM/Adobe and others are major contributors to the project), so it is not unusual for a commercial company to Open Source a product, or even pay part of its staff to maintain one. I will not list again the many benefits that this move can offer (just see what Jan Aleman said in the official press release), the problem is that there can also be very bad consequences if the company is not “open” enough.
About openness, you might remember the famous post about the failephant of the Ushahidi project. This is something to keep in mind.
Yes, in matters of Open Source, there is a flip side of the coin: benefits on one side, big dangers on the other. What will make a big difference when you draw is the company’s attitude towards openness in general.
Now since I like the platform very much, I would like Servoy to get all the benefits and none of the drawbacks.
Josh Berkus, CEO of PostgreSQL Experts Inc (quoted “one of the foremost PostgreSQL consulting firms in the world” on Servoy blog), lately summarized how easy it was to destroy an Open Source community.
Interestingly enough, the Josh Berkus who did this presentation is the very same guy who will be doing next thursday’s webinar about Open Source Servoy and PostgreSQL…
Please read his very informative (yet funny) slides called “10 Ways to Destroy Your Community” - there is also an abridged version for the impatient (funny and informative as well), called “Destroy your Community in 5 easy steps“.
For those of you who also want some background comments about these slides, you can read the post Josh made about Sun and the Ten Ways.
If Sun and dozen others did it so badly, there is still hope that Servoy will do it right…
For now, I would particularly insist on point 3 of the “10 ways”, point 6 is very important of course, point 7 and 9 seem obvisouly also very important… Anyway, any of these points are important.
Now you would understand when I say that there are dangers if you don’t do it right, so I hope that Servoy will especially refer to the last slide of the presentation and keep that in mind… and act accordingly.
Because in the end, and Servoy needs to be very careful about this, if you don’t do it right, it’s worse than not doing it at all!
Let’s just hope that Servoy will be listening to Josh Berkus good advices and not fall into the trap of destroying its Open Source Community before it even exists.
Personally, I cross my fingers…
