Enterprise Linux Community

Ok. I can’t be the only one.¹

I look at open source projects like OpenSolaris, Alfresco, Resin, Magento, OpenSuSE, Fedora, and MySQL, among others, and I wonder “What’s the community around these projects that people are always talking about.” Sure I can download the source code under licenses that I’m comfortable with, sure they talk about a community, but what does that mean?

What, as a company, does it mean to say that the software you develop (and likely own all the rights to,) is “open source,” and “supported by a community?”

If I were sensible, I’d probably stop writing this post here. From the perspective of the users of and participants in open source software, this is the core question, both because it dictates what we can expect from free software and open source and more importantly because it has been historically ill defined.

There are two additional, but related, questions that lurk around this question, at least in my mind:

1. Why are new open source projects only seen as legitimate if the developers are able to build a business around the project?

2. What does it mean to be a contributor to open source in this world, and what do contributors in “the community,” get from contributing to commercial projects?

There are of course exceptions to this rule: the Debian Project, the Linux Kernel itself, GNU packages, and most open source programming languages among others. I’d love to know if I’ve missed a class of software in this list--and there’s one exception that I’ll touch on in a moment--but the commonality here is that that these projects are so low level that it seems too hard to build businesses around directly.

When “less technical” free software projects began to take off, I think a lot of people said “I don’t know if this open source thing will work when the users of the software aren’t hackers,” because after all what does open source code do for non-hackers? While it’s true that there are fringe benefits that go beyond the simple “free as in beer” quality of open source for non-hacker users, these benefits are not always obvious. In a lot of ways the commercialization around open source software helps add a buffer between upstreams and end users. This is why I included Debian in the list above. Debian is very much a usable operating system, but in practice it’s often an upstream of other distributions. Ubuntu, Maemo, etc.

The exception that I mentioned is, to my mind, projects like Drupal and web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Django. These communities aren’t sponsored or driven by venture capital funded companies. Though the leader of the Drupal community has taken VC money for a Drupal-related start up. I think the difference here is that the economic activity around these projects is consulting based: people use Drupal/Django/Rails to build websites (which aren’t, largely open source) for clients. In a lot of ways these are much closer to the “traditional free software business model,” as envisioned in the eighties and nineties, than what seems to prevail at the moment.

So to summarize the questions:

• What, as a company, does it mean to say that the software you develop (and likely own all the rights to,) is “open source,” and “supported by a community?”
• What does it mean to participate in and contribute to a community around a commercial product that you don’t have any real stake in?
• How does the free software community, which is largely technical and hacker centered, transcend to deal with and serve end users?
• How do we legitimize projects that aren’t funded with venture capital money?

Onward and Upward!