AlwaysOn sits down with Ximian founders Nat Friedman and Miguel de Icaza :: Novell & Linux

i wonder why does the mainstream media have to repeatedly refer to 'Linux' !! no wonder that the Free Software Foundation is compelled to through this link. That aside, the interview does really through up some nice points about corporate involvement in the F/L OSS space. Sometime back Developers Lab posted a nice feature on Free/Libre Open Source Software and the osmosis effect it has in the corporate community. This recent interview takes a logical step forward.

An excerpt reads as ::

Friedman: One of the things that is really important to us is to get Novell to recognize that an open-source community is a social fabric of individuals organized in a meritocracy; it's not consortium or standards. If you're a company that wants to be credible and have strategic input in the Linux world—the open source world—you have to have key individuals weaved into that fabric that are part of your company. You have to have major contributors, people who are maintainers, people who are driving the strategy in the community, freely and openly, that are part of the company, too. You can interlace your goals and the goals of the community. That's how it works. And so it's not about a top-level decision to throw some money at Linux; it's about actually having people in the team.

[emphasis mine]

This is an absolutely on-the-ball assessment of the rules of the game, from someone who is a trailblazer. To gain credibility, corporates must leave the age-old theory of 'let's throw more money into the ring and cook up a storm'. As Nat states it's about a team. F/L OSS has classically eulogised and idolised the team based collaborative platform. With corporate makeovers it is important not to lose sight of the community based goals and strategic long term plans. It is easy to do so with release deadlines and 'process paralysis'.

Bringing in corporates mandates a more transparent development as well as standards based development. At some point of time, having a major 'name' comes in handy to push through protocols and processes. While this is evident in various global cases, in the case of India, this needs to be studied in depth. With more maturity, perhaps a better understanding of the dynamics will evolve.
- posted by sankarshan @ 1/14/2004 08:53:00 PM