One of the stalwarts of Subversion, Ben Collins-Sussman (a Googler and former CollabNetizen), remarks Not that this should shock anybody, but in case you didn’t know, now you do. The overlap between Apache and Subversion communities has always been huge since day one — with essentially identical cultures. We’ve talked about doing this for years. [...]
Categories: Subversion
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The Internet is full of comparisons of the relative popularity of web browsers, but something these analyses miss is that "web" traffic is increasingly not about "browsers" at all. As SOAP and SaaS and Clouds expand, the web has largely become the Internet: the backbone for many services not directly displayed to human eyes. As [...]
Categories: Subversion
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Chris Brogan’s Trust Agents: “Communities don’t want to be managed: they want to be cared for.”
Categories: Community Management
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A while ago, I pointed out that many discussions of open-source related business models are leaving something out: infrastructure. A lot of people have asked me to explain the difference between "open core" and "open infrastructure"–don't they both mean "open-sourcing the basic stuff"? Well, to some extent they do, but the difference is real, and [...]
Categories: Subversion
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Commenting on the differences between the business models of Red Hat and Acquia, Matt Asay really nails a point: there's value to be added by a company simply packaging and redistributing open-source work, but it's greatest where there's intimidating complexity to be managed. Both Red Hat and Acquia provide reliable, solid packaging of underlying open-source [...]
Categories: Subversion
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Why do people contribute to open-source or inner-source projects? It's long been recognized that one major aspect is something usually described as "peer esteem." In Apache and the future of open-source licensing, Matt Asay makes the mistake of assuming it's the only factor, and compounds the mistake by assuming he can (re)define the term for [...]
Categories: Community Management
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In the echo chamber of developer tools, a hot topic these days is "distributed vs. central version control." The debate has an unfortunate tendency to polarize into "developer vs. organization," which of course doesn't really help anyone at all. WANdisco's Jim Campigli, writing as "SubversionMan" (jeez, Jim: show a little respect for the nearly one thousand committers and other [...]
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Matt Aslett of the 451 Group has provided a great example of some powerful yet overlooked aspects of some of the most successful open-source projects. The example is a utility called memcached, an in-memory caching daemon to speed up web applications. The first, oh so obvious yet oh so overlooked aspect: As John Mark Walker noted just [...]
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I spent a great half-day at CloudCamp @ CommunityOne, this week. This was an Unconference, "a facilitated, participant-driven conference centered around a theme or purpose," meaning that the agenda and content were provided by the participants. The format can be very effective, especially in cutting-edge, rapidly evolving areas like this. Indicative of the state of cloud computing, our [...]
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"Open source development" is vastly more about the openness of the development that the openness of the source. This can be confusing, and may be at the root of some of the classic first-encounter confusions. A great exploration of the point has just surfaced in a totally non-code area: O'Reilly Media and authors are pioneering [...]
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