[advocacy-discuss] Corporate Open Source

[Jim Grisanzio]

Roman Strobl wrote:
> Hi guys,
>   

Hey, Roman, nice to see you here! :)

> 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 

Yes, I remember when Eclipse was launched. :) I was doing communications 
for the NetBeans team at the time. That situation was actually tougher 
than anything OpenSolaris has faced thus far (although the situations 
are quite different).

> 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.). 

The plug-ins feature of NetBeans probably enables a large number of 
people to contribute without having to touch the main code base. Is that 
an accurate way to look at it? An companies can contribute plug-ins, 
too, right? I think Indiana will help us engage more developers who can 
contribute and maintain packages without having to dig into the kernel 
source.

> 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!). 
Yah, up until very recently we have been a source community and anyone 
hanging out here would have to be pretty technical. But with the 
addition of easy-to-use distros and live CDs, we are gaining users and 
non-techies. Now we need a few hundred thousand of them. :) And this is 
especially important for us because the traditional Solaris market is 
very quiet compared to Java. Now, the OpenSolaris community is more 
vocal than the Solaris market (customers, I mean), but we are still too 
small to have a big impact when you consider global communications 
challenges. So, I agree with the need for users, and the numbers need to 
scale dramatically.

> NetBeans user community grew 10x in size in last 4 years - 

How many users? Are you especially strong in certain geos?


> 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).
>   
We have user groups here inside the Advocacy Community Group. We 
launched with zero UGs and now there are almost 70 on opensolaris.org. I 
think there are a few more out there not directly connected to this 
site, too. But we don't have any other direct outreach program here. 
It's come up from time to time, but resources were never there to 
support it (I myself have many proposals with cob webs on them) and 
quite frankly interest in the community has been low. I think that will 
change with Indiana, though, as we specifically reach out to users with 
a binary. Most recently Aaron proposed an evangelist-type program, so 
eventually something like this will come to OpenSolaris. I'd say that 
the most active user traffic thus far have been in Bangalore, and it's 
no surprise that they've been working on a distro for some time.

Jim
-- 
http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris