[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Roman Strobl]

Hi guys,

I have been working for last 3 years as an evangelist on the NetBeans 
project. I can tell you that we've been knocked around many times in the 
beginning but it doesn't happen any more (or very rarely). I've been 
thinking what caused the change - why don't the outsiders complain about 
NetBeans community and development processes anymore. Yes, we did open 
up some of our processes, started to use wiki for planning, all 
engineering docs and so on. On the other hand the number of code 
contributions for NetBeans from outside is still not very large 
(although we get lots of plug-ins, community docs, blogs, screencasts, 
etc.). We had been knocked for the number of code contributions and 
non-Sun involvement very often in the beginning, but it doesn't happen 
anymore.

I think that the biggest reason why people stopped to bash the community 
was the adoption increase (I don't mean number of developers, but 
users!). NetBeans user community grew 10x in size in last 4 years - and 
it is not easy to complain anymore because many people outside of Sun 
react and protect NetBeans. Developers also noticed that we were able to 
innovate faster in many cases than competition which I think gave 
NetBeans community credit.

It is very easy to attack an open source project if it's less popular 
than it's competition and for some reason there are many people around 
the world that like to do these kind of things :(

Another thing that we did was that we formalized the group of NetBeans 
enthusiasts outside of Sun:
http://wiki.netbeans.org/NetBeansDreamTeam

These guys have been amazing in protecting NetBeans community whenever 
any basher attacked us - since they are not from Sun they have 
credibility when protecting NetBeans community. The dream team has their 
own mailing list and have lots of traffic working on growing and 
advocating NetBeans community.

I don't know if OpenSolaris has any such organized group of worldwide 
non-Sun enthusiasts, if not, you may consider estabilishing one (I know 
you have many UGs but that's something different).

-Roman

Jim Grisanzio wrote:
> We seem to be in some blogs and on Slashdot recently -- and not 
> necessarily in nice ways.
>
> There are many things in these blogs below I disagree with, but when you 
> spend the time to dig through them you are left with the realization 
> that we as a community are not well understood -- at best. :) For those 
> of us involved in this project, we certainly know we are behind in some 
> key ares, but it seems that others are using that fact to continually 
> hit us instead of getting involved and helping out or at least rooting 
> us on from the sidelines. Also, we are doing some great things here as a 
> community, and that's not getting out nearly as much as it should. Why?
>
> OpenSolaris has been knocked around many times in our three years of 
> life, and I've always said that the knocks would continue until we built 
> a community -- something that is obvious and could not be denied. 
> Perhaps I was wrong. I think we have built a community, but perhaps it's 
> not obvious or easily seen. Or perhaps it's still too soon and the 
> community is still too small. Perhaps we are not open enough and our 
> community doesn't contribute enough. I don't know. What do you guys 
> think? Also, the first link below is from Matt Asay, who writes about 
> the difficulty of doing community development on company-sponsored 
> projects. I think he brings up a good issues there. We are being 
> compared to other open source communities and falling short when in 
> reality the comparison itself is faulty to begin with. All open source 
> communities are different, and we are one of the company-sponsored 
> communities and everything about that is different.
>
> The difficulty of building community around commercial: The OpenSolaris 
> example
> http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9928690-7.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=NewsBlog
>
> What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris
> http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/04/19/what-sun-was-trying-to-do-with-open-solaris/
>
> Ted Ts’o Dissects “What Sun was trying to do with OpenSolaris”
> http://www.michaeldolan.com/1171
>
> Jim
>