Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

It’s interesting to hear that Liferay switched to the LGPL recently.

On top of that, they did the license switch in a way that involved their community (which is a good thing and should be noted by other companies looking to do the same thing). Anyways, there’s interesting discussion in why they did it and also people’s reactions in the comments are always fun to read…

Well, it’s a legitimate detriment to us. Our company has a policy preventing the incorporation of any open source product licensed under GPL or LGPL in any of our products. Irrespective of one’s opinion as to the wisdom or necessity of this, there are many organizations that have similar policies.

Sad that many companies still have this policy…

On a side note, maybe my prediction about the rise of weak copy left licenses has some merit?

I recently joined the advisory board for The Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) which is one of my favorite reads when it comes to crossroads of open source and business. I find that when it comes to quality business-related open source material out there, we don’t have many options (or I’m just not aware of them yet). I mean, besides opensource.com, a couple analyst firms and a few interesting blogs, I don’t have much to go on.

In the latest issue of OSBR which targets the mobile industry, there’s one article I really appreciate by Andreas Constantinou which starts off with this revealing quote…

“Open source licenses tell only half the story. The governance model, the implicit rules defining transparency and influence into an open source project, is the small print that determines the power dynamics around that project.”

If you haven’t noticed, the mobile industry is in an open renaissance when it comes to giving people access to source and allowing them to contribute via a variety of levels. For those who had the pleasure to work in mobile in the past, this is a bit shocking given how the industry previously treated access to mobile operating system source. The important part of the article is when it starts mapping open source license types to governance models (see the fairly accurate figure below). And discusses how the mobile industry needs less marketing hype around the benefits of openness, but more education and clarity on governance models.

See where Eclipse fits in (it’s snuggling next to Symbian)? Do people like it there ?

Just because Android says they are open, doesn’t necessarily mean they are when it comes to governance. Anyways, give the latest OSBR issue a read if the mobile industry is your cup of tea. If you want to see anything in upcoming issues, like a potential theme covered, please let me know.

Over the weekend, I noticed a bug trickle in…

I first thought… wow what a !@#$, this is not a way to win friends and influence people…

I was thankful my team responded correctly with the mantra of killing people with kindness.

As open source developers, we have to remember to have some restraint when interacting with our consumers. The old adage of killing people with kindness should apply to most of the cases we deal with. As consumers of open source software, it’s important to follow some basic etiquette rules when hitting a problem and reporting a bug:

• Be civil and positive when reporting bugs. Saying the !@#$ing software sucks isn’t going to help.
• Be patient when reporting bugs. Some people work on projects on a volunteer basis (if you need better support, some open source projects have commercial support offerings).
• Don’t double post and spam all the open source project’s communication channels.
• Read “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way” and live by it

In the end, it’s all about interacting with people. Over the net, it’s easy to forget that we are actually dealing with people; not autonomous robots without any emotion.

How should open source projects handle donations? And do it in a tasteful fashion?

I ask because I’ve been doing some work lately do expose the Friends of Eclipse program at Eclipse in a variety of ways. For example, I want to add a link on Eclipsepedia as we have on a variety of the Eclipse download pages.

I’m a fan of the Friends of Eclipse program because I believe in the power of community. All donations benefit the Eclipse community in some fashion from providing more bandwidth for users and committers to sponsoring Eclipse community events. The program is there as a way to contribute to Eclipse for people who may not have the time to become a committer but have the financial resources and desire to contribute. For awhile, I don’t think the program was very visible and that’s changed as the link has appeared on the download page. There are now over 1000 donations to the program! I see a future where we could get a considerable amount of support from the Friends of Eclipse program and help the Eclipse Foundation sponsor more events.

But is there a line that we can cross where it seems like we’re pan handling ?

I tried to look at how other projects handle donations.

If you look at Wikipedia, their approach is to have everything front and center.

It seems to work for Wikipedia as they tend to have a fund raising drive model. Their users don’t seem to mind either. The Linux Foundation has a way to donate on its web page and they also have a program similar to the Friends of Eclipse where you can sign up for individual membership with some benefits.

How do other people view donation in the open source context? Is there a line to cross?

How do other open source projects do this?

One of my big interests is building and analyzing communities, especially in the open source space. I’ve learned a lot from my experience in the Gentoo Linux and Eclipse communities and take joy in the experience. There are so many interesting topics within community building from effective communication mechanisms to development processes to governance. I see a future where a lot of software is developed in the open and building a community around that will be vital to the success of that piece of software. As I was writing this post, Microsoft just announced that they are open sourcing the .NET micro framework and attempting to build a open community around the technology…

Microsoft is also in the process of forming a community of interested and involved members to help shape the future direction of the product. There will be a core technology team that is composed of Microsoft and external partners, and people will be encouraged to propose projects, which will be vetted before they are accepted…. The site will also support people building extensions that exist alongside the platform rather than being integrated into it…

You know when Microsoft is releasing stuff under the Apache 2.0 license and attempting to build communities there’s a shift in the industry happening. Good for them!

Ok, on to the point of this post now. My reading list went empty recently and I needed to fill it with some interesting books. In particular, I was looking for books related to open source and community building. The good news is that I found a couple of interesting books, the bad news is that I wish there were more books on these topics. I’ve been devouring the Art of Community book by Jono Bacon (Ubuntu’s Community Manager).

It’s a fascinating book which outlines some of the aspects of community building and share’s many of Jono’s experiences in developing the Ubuntu community. A lot of the things he discusses can be mapped to what is going on within the Eclipse community. Jono’s coverage of the importance of meritocracy and governance pleases me.

Anyone else have a chance to read the book yet?

Another book that I’m looking to devour is the Groundswell by a couple of Forrester Research’s analysts.

I’m always a fan of case studies around social technology and how it can impact your business. My favorite recent example is the United Breaks Guitars debacle… how much heartache did that cost United? I’ll let people know what I think of Groundswell when I finish it.

Anyone else reading anything good around open source of community building lately? Any recommendations?

Inside the Eclipse community, we’re looking at ways to make it easier for people to contribute. Part of that work involves working on improving the web presence of Eclipse when potential contributors come visit (the other major part is at the code level, but we will leave that for another post). To help me with some ideas on how to improve the contributor experience on the Eclipse.org site, I wanted to look at how other open source communities are handling it at the moment. My thought was that visiting other community sites would also help me play the role as contributor since I’m so entrenched with things at Eclipse and have a difficult time putting myself into the role of a contributor.

Mozilla

When visiting the Mozilla site, I was greeted with a gigantic Get Involved button.

Mozilla realizes that there are many types of contributors out there and accommodates appropriately for that.

As a bonus, Mozilla even had contribution options based on how much time you have available!

Awesome!

Symbian

The Symbian site had no clear way for me to realize how I can contribute to the effort. The site was pretty but I’m not sure the excessive use of flash is going to win bonus points with developers (does Flash even run on Symbian-based phones?).

After some digging, I found the Symbian developer site.

It was pretty easy to find links to code, bug tracking and forums. I didn’t see any obvious links for people who may want to contribute translations or their artistic skills to the project. Then again, the Symbian foundation is pretty new so maybe they aren’t at the point where they need translation contributions.

Fedora

Inside the Fedora site, I immediately was drawn to the Join Fedora link.

After clicking that link, I was presented with a wonderful variety of ways I can contribute to the Fedora project.

I’m a huge fan of any open source community that realizes that contributors come in all shapes and sizes; there aren’t only coders out there.

Ubuntu

The Ubuntu site had nothing obvious on how to get involved immediately (you have to scroll down quite a bit to see a link to get involved).

I dug around a bit and found a link to Get Involved with the Ubuntu community. I was delighted to be presented with the way I would like to get involved.

Ubuntu seemed to classify its contributors into developers, non-technical users, technical users and people willing to donate money.

Seems reasonable.

Conclusion

What did I learn at the end of this exercise? It’s important to realize that there are many different forms of contributor roles in open source. Here’s my simplified version of the major roles contributors may play:

• Writers
  • These people can help with things like documentation and articles
• Developers
  • These people can code; provide patches; potentially become committers
• Translators / Internationalization
  
  • These people can help with internationalization efforts
• Graphical Artists / Designers
  • These people can help with artwork; don’t let coders design things
• Evangelists
  • These people can help organize events and spread the word; marketing is key

There are contributors that may fit many of these roles, but most will specialize in one type of role. The key thing to understand is that you need to cater to each of these roles including how much time people have (like Mozilla did). For example, developers will want to know how to access code and contribute patches to the project. Translators will need to know where to go to translate strings for the project or file bugs for long German words that wreak havoc on your user interface. And so on…

What do people think? What can open source communities do better at making it easier for people to contribute? As a next step, I’ll take a look at playing the role of contributor in one of these communities and write a “Hello, World” type application.

If you have any ideas on how to improve the contributor experience at Eclipse, please comment on this bug.

Reading Vineet’s blog post about Community-Driven Commercial Development yesterday had me thinking about a potential problem with this development approach. First off, I think there needs to be a training class on how people should build development communities and interact with an open community.

Why? From my experience, people from a commercial development background tend to have a harder time working in open communities. There are really no managers out there in open communities, you’re typically on your own. There’s no climbing up the chain of people to force someone to do something. In open-source communities, you tend to be on your own and need to learn some skills to help your project survive.

I hate to admit this, but I’ve seen a few examples in the Eclipse community of new projects (that will remain nameless) with developers (commercial backgrounds) come in and do a poor job of building a community. Some concrete examples are not responding to inquiries of people willing to help on newsgroups or even just being downright mean in bugs. On the other hand, I’ve seen many great examples in Eclipse of community building. For example, I remember when Boris Bokowoski was helping this guy named Tom Schindl. For people who don’t know Tom, Tom was responsible for a lot of JFace improvements in 3.3, and without Boris’ patience and willing to help, this wouldn’t have been possible. I’ve also seen many great examples of community building around Eclipse’s Summer of Code program.

As members in the Eclipse community, how do we fix this problem? Is this something even fixable, or some people just better at community building than others? Should we have something part of our committer bootcamp to help new committers? In the end, the ability to build a community around your project is paramount, because the community is the lifeblood of your project.