| Open Source -- the one, true way to develop software |
Feb. 16, 2006
Real revolutions, the ones that last, are often quiet ones.
They aren't shocking. They don't rock the world. They just change the world so slowly that it's only when you wake up one day and think about it, you realize the world isn't the same anymore.
That's what's happened with open source and software development.
If you step into the Wayback Machine to say February 2001, you'll find that open-source and Linux are still regarded with a great deal of suspicion. IBM is supporting Linux and open-source, but most mainstream software companies will have nothing to do with either one. For the most part, the Linux and open-source banners are carried by small, start-up companies.
Fast forward to 2006.
These are some of this week's software headlines: And on, and on, and on...
Today, the mainstream software business is the open-source business.
Of course, some people still don't get it. Over at CRN, a columnist wrote on February 14th, "You gotta wonder at this point, if you haven't already, how the open source faithful feel about contributing their hard-earned work and sweat equity into code that will now flow out of such non-philanthropic entities as Oracle and IBM."
"Enclosed please find the provisions of your employment contract. As before, you will be receiving zero dollars per week in your position of code contributor."
Who is she talking about? The vast majority of the open-source programmers I know work for companies like IBM, Novell, Red Hat, and Sun.
Open-source is not a bare-footed guy who doesn't know when to wash his hair, living in his parent's basement, and coding for chips and Jolt cola. He may be bare-footed and drinking Jolt, but chances are someone is paying him a salary.
He's getting paid that salary because, as Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu fame recently pointed out in his blog, "the issue, as I see it, is leadership. Most open source projects are founded by one or two people who have a very clear idea of what they want to create and how they plan to do so. They have an itch to scratch. Once they have a basic framework together, other people start to use it and the stone soup effect kicks in… some of the users become developers, and the bazaar magic happens. But here's what's critical -- the success of the project continues to depend on its leadership, usually by the founders but sometimes in a more institutional way (like the Debian project)."
Project leadership. Now why does that sound familiar? Because, it's the way all successful software team projects -- open or closed -- get done.
What open-source adds to it is "The beauty of the open source process is that non-core developers ARE willing and able to play with shiny geek toys. It's the core team that I need to keep focused, they set the release schedule and core functionality/infrastructure pace of development. But the fact that outsiders are able to think laterally, and experiment with code that can be proven outside of the main development process is what gives open source its real diversity and amazing ability to innovate."
And, how do you keep a core team focused? Or, even together long enough to become a core team? With salaries, benefits... you know, all the stuff that Linus Torvalds gets from the OSDL (Open Source Development Labs), Alan Cox gets from Red Hat, and so on.
One of the things, though, that is different about open-source is that it's a meritocracy. If you can have the right code, the right stuff, you can be young or old, male or female, black, white, or tangerine, but your work will speak for you and you should be able to get a job.
If you were in the software business, who would you hire? Someone with a bachelor's degree and who's written student projects in Java? Or a college dropout but who's done a lot for Linux? I don't know about you, but Google picked Chris DiBona, who was one class shy of his computer science degree, to be its open source program manager.
What do you think? Does Google seem to have a clue about what it's doing?
It's this same system of advancement by merit, the bazaar of open-source development, as opposed to the cathedral of traditional software engineering, which has made open-source the 21st century's way of developing software.
Today, only Microsoft, of all the major software powers, still clings to the old cathedral model.
They won't do it forever, you know.
I know that Microsoft turning to open-source seems impossible to you.
Think about it. Vista and Office 2007 may not sell like hot-cakes. Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer will eventually retire. And, Microsoft will start to lose its grip on the market. It happened to US Steel, it happened to the Detroit-based automobile companies, and it happened to IBM, which came back by remaking itself. It will happen to Microsoft.
Come that day, Microsoft will have to join the rest of the software world in realizing that open-source isn't just a way to write software, it's the best way to write software.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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