Sunday November 20, 2005

Open Source and Mechanical Advantage

Cross posting this to my old Sun blog http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh and my new blog at http://clairegiordano.org/blog/

I opened a bottle of wine on Friday night [1]  and in my mind thanked the person who had given us the Screwpull opener as a gift.  A flick of the wrist, hardly any effort on my part, and the bottle is uncorked.  Mechanical advantage is really quite wonderful, isn't it?

And that's when the question hit me - perhaps open source is like mechanical advantage?

I'm constantly looking for real-world analogies that will help to explain what I do - and in particular open source - to friends of mine who are not in the industry.  So please bear with me while I explore the analogy.

Just a moment before, I had been thinking about an email I'd received from one of my OpenSolaris colleagues about the planned "University Sun Days" being organized by another team at Sun.  Excerpt of his email:

"It seems to me that we [OpenSolaris marketing and engineering teams] should have a much more significant role in this. In other words, shouldn't OpenSolaris presentations that are being made to universities be done by people from the OpenSolaris development/marketing team?"

He asks a good question.  I certainly would love the opportunity to talk face to face with developers at these University Days.  And there is real value is in the Q&A conversation that ensues - which if done right is a win/win, both strengthening their understanding of how OpenSolaris might help them and my understanding of what students and developers want.

That said, the engineering and marketing teams at Sun simply cannot scale to do this.  There aren't enough of us to go around.  And - perhaps what we have to say might be too insular?  There are certainly benefits to having a diverse set of evangelists who can reach different audiences and make different connections.  (If you haven't yet read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, please do, and you'll see what I mean.)

I've recently engaged in a discussion about what open source is about.  Is it about the code?  Or is it about the community?  My belief is that open source is about the community.  Which is not to say that all open source projects have community-building as top priority.  And I do not mean to say that there are no benefits from a sharable code commons - of course there are, since with a sharable code commons, people don't need to start from scratch for each project they undertake.  And I don't mean to equate open source with open development; I recognize that some open source projects don't do development in the open, which means that while they are technically open source projects, they are not nurturing a community of participants.

So what do I mean?  I think the real value of making a project an open source/open development project is the power unleashed by enpowering a community.  Empowering many people to each make their own mark, in support of shared goals and objectives, is a very powerful way to make a technology grow and spread and solve even more problems.  Sure, you have to give up control (which is not to say that you give up leadership - you still have the opportunity to lead and influence), but the potential benefits far outweigh the cost of giving up control, IMHO.

Going back to the discussion of the "University Sun Days" - one of the benefits of an open development project is that the initial team doesn't have to give presentations at all 50 universities. There are other evangelists.  More cropping up all the time, in fact.  They each bring their own talent and creativity and passion to the table.  They'll come up with new approaches and new ideas.   And as a result, we'll be able to reach many more universities, and developers, and communities.  So, with a little bit of evangelization on our part - on the opensolaris.org site, via blogging and via outreach to the other sales and marketing teams at Sun - there is now a growing set of diverse evangelists that can accomplish far far far more.  Kind of like mechanical advantage. 

[1]  Rodney Strong 2003 Sonoma County Chardonnay, for you wine afficianados out there.

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(2005-11-20 18:21:50.0) Permalink