Community Matters

I continue to be amazed how few people really understand where open source makes the difference. There are so many people trying (deperately, it seems at times) to explain it to the masses. Yet, I seem to have many more conversations with people who don’t “get it” than the ones that do.

Now there are two conclusions to draw from this. (a) we aren’t trying hard enough for people to actually understand. Or (b) we are wrong.

Watching the bubble-analysts (back in the dot-gone days or just recently with real estate or the web-2.0 companies) have most of their arguments revolve around how the rules have changed and how those who disagree just don’t get it makes me uncomfortable - as this so much sounds like the open source people talking to the non-believers.

Open source allows you to have more smart people work on your project than you could possibly hire. And more people test your code than you could possibly afford in a closed environment. If you are successful in creating a community around your project. And if you get good governance in your project and some motivated and skilled project leaders. And if … There are so many ways that this can fail.

So maybe what is good about open source is that it gives you all this potential. And that it is up to you to figure out how to make that work - with few people stopping you (assuming you avoid mistakes like calling your project something that blatantly infringes on someone else’s copyrights and other easy stuff like this…)

That opportunity in itself is basically enough for me to state “open source is good”. And the honesty about this being nothing more than an opportunity is what in my mind differentiates us from the bubble artists.

Thanks for visiting!
I hope this was helpful - if not, please leave a comment and let me know why! Were you searching for something else? Did I miss an important aspect?