The Community Development Model: Mission Critical or Warm & Fuzzy?

by Jeremy Chan

Bdale Garbee, Open Source & Linux CTO at Hewlett-Packard, presented a keynote speech entitled "Reaping the Benefits of the Community Development Model" at the LinuxWorld and NetworkWorld Conference & Expo in Toronto.

Garbee opened with anecdotes about his participation in the open-source community over the last 25 years. This includes a small piece of utility code he developed as a young boy, for which he was later invited to confer with his "peers" in the field, who at the time didn't realize his mother probably wouldn't let him attend a conference on his own to discuss his ideas at that age. He described the experience as one that heralded the community development model as something he was sure he would always participate in. Of note, Bdale has been a contributor to the Debian GNU/Linux project since 1995, and has some open source code running in a few satellites currently orbiting around the earth.

Bdale attempted to address the concerns of those currently reluctant to embrace the community development model. He listed their main concerns as follows:

• Concerned about accountability for support.
  
• Making all the pieces work together.
  
• Defining on open source strategy.
  
• Developing a criteria for software selection.
  
• Obtaining technical skills.
  

He then delineated what the state of open source adoption in the world today, honing in on Linux and many open source products are now commodities that just about everyone is running in some capacity or another. Though Windows is eating into the proprietary Unix market share, Linux is grabbing share at a faster rate--Linux uptake is faster than any other operating system available today, and currently sits at healthy 20 percent of all enterprise deployments. Slightly behind the operating system curve, but still quite healthy are open-source middleware like Apache, JBoss, etc. Finally, adoption of general-purpose open-source applications (such as OpenOffice) is still in its infancy. He expects the adoption trend to continue at each of these levels.

His contention was that the community development model, used on many of today's open-source projects (the most obvious of which is Linux), has come of age. Linux and open source are currently an indispensable part of HP's IT strategy, as evidenced by the litany of open-source software running in their environment, including Linux, Bind, OpenLDAP, and Apache. Thousands of HPs employees send all of their email using open-source email smtp and IMAP servers. Garbee cited open-source projects as key cost-saving element since the merger with Compaq.

And cost is only one of the obvious advantages of open source and the community development model. Some of the others:

• Try before you buy.
  
• No vendor lock in.
  
• Community engagement.
  
• Great performance.
  
• Security through openness.
  
• Choice of support models.
  
• Ability to participate/influence directions.
  

The ability to choose your support model is one often overlooked advantage--if you choose to develop the skills to support your own open source deployments, information on how to do so is freely available. If you choose instead to pay for that support, there are a bevy of community members available to help. Just how much support you need and are willing to pay for is up to you.

One other important characteristics of open source is the ability to fork the source code if you're not happy with the direction of the codebase. Most open source communities know that forking is painful, and therefore go to great lengths to resolve differences and live within the established licensing models for that software. In this way, communities self-regulate. It is important, however, that the ability to fork exist. The community may stagnate and perhaps drift into a centrally controlled model in which innovation may stagnate. Forking can be the release valve for just such a situation, and can restore the excitement and community model to the process. One example in which this occurred for the general benefit of the community was with XWindows system, some form of which is now used in just about every environment that doesn't originate in Redmond.

Jeremy Chan is a Principal Consultant at the Jonah Group and a Technical Architect with over 10 years of experience in object-oriented software engineering.

Posted by Jeremy Chan at 12:24 AM  Permalink

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