It seems like a bit of a mystery how open source
software ever sees the light of day. The idea of a large number of
people working for glory and the greater good rather than
recompense seems too idealistic to be true.
In the early days this is exactly what happened, but now
commercial companies have arisen, or switched over to open source,
to act as the marketing arm of these communities. There are now a
large number of paid workers at
Red Hat,
Novell,
Ingres and other open source
businesses and these corporations are beginning to act in ways that
mirror their closed source counterparts.
Joe Brockmeier, Novell's openSUSE community manager, says, "We
employ people to work on things that some of the volunteers are not
necessarily going to jump to. For example, not many volunteers want
to do long-term maintenance or go back and fix an old bug. Most
want to develop an existing feature or something that does not
exist yet. So we have to hire people to do some of the heavy
lifting that volunteer contributors typically do not do."
Brockmeier describes the other strategies used to push ahead in
the open source market. "One strategy is to identify the company
that started a project and go ahead and buy it so you have a great
deal of influence in the direction of that technology.
The other way is to identify a project and get involved to
influence the project, as
Sun Microsystems did with
PostgreSQL when it hired Josh Burkus who was then a core team
member for the product."
After two years, Berkus has decided to move on and will be
replaced by Peter Eisentraut, another member of the PostgreSQL core
team. This typifies the fluid nature of the open source
community.
People move from project to project as their interests dictate
and this can act as a hedge against the burn-out that full-time
coders seem to suffer from in closed source companies and offers
much more freedom. "Typically, there is a lot of give and take.
Very few people in the open source community are willing to be
hired on or dictated to," Brockmeier says.
In terms of acquisitions, the open source movement is maturing
and this has been marked by the growing string of acquisitions of
smaller companies with bright ideas. Notably. Novell bought
Platespin to simplify virtual server implementation, and Red Hat
acquired Qumranet for its KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) product for
virtual machine deployment and management.
Community spirit
Whatever route is taken to adopt and develop a project, the key
requirement is a loyal following, a community. This is probably the
greatest challenge in open source.
Graham Taylor, chief executive of OpenForum Europe, a business
consultancy promoting the use of open source, says, "In the early
days there were a number of companies which saw the open source,
free software tag and suddenly announced they were going open
source. All they did was to make their product available under an
open source licence. The fundamental thing, that people now
understand, is that if you do not have a community behind you and
with you, it will fall flat."
Ingres, a former proprietary database company that open sourced
its codebase in 1998 after its acquisition by CA, was a pioneer of
the transition from closed to open. Although the company knew that
a community was essential, it had no idea how to attract support.
Thinking like a proprietary company, its board decided that a
competition would do the trick.
Emma McGrattan, senior vice-president for engineering at Ingres,
recalls, "We were wondering how we could get a community around
Ingres from day one so we launched what we called the Ingres $1m
Challenge. The competition was to build a migration toolset to take
applications from Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and other database
companies. We thought $1m would attract hundreds of entries but we
had fewer than 20 - it was disappointing. One of the lessons we
learnt about communities at this early stage was that money alone
does not buy it. You have to put a lot of work into building
relationships with the community."
Now an independent company again, Ingres has successfully
attracted its community within its 10,000-strong customer base and
developed its own way of working with it. "We have created a
roadshow where we take our engineers to meet some motivated people
from our user groups.
They meet together in a room for a three or four days and the
engineers work side by side with the community members to develop a
feature that will fix a bug or add a feature that is interesting to
that particular member," McGrattan says.
As an example of the results, she explains that Ingres' audit
capability lacked the capabilities that a customer required to meet
EU regulations. Although the database allows the auditing of all
activity down to the row level, it could not record every time a
certain row was selected for viewing.
But an EU regulation specified that a viewing of a judge's home
address needed to be tracked and recorded. The Ingres engineers and
the customer were able to put that in within the course of the
three-day roadshow.
Linux
Some projects attract a community more easily than others. The
high profile of the Linux kernel has attracted almost double the
number of developers that worked on Microsoft Windows Server 2000 -
but servicing a fifth of the number of lines of code.
The pivotal position of the kernel attracts engineers from all
the major IT companies to ensure that they have a say in what lies
upstream. The upstream concept cascades down through Linux. Changes
in the kernel have to be anticipated by the downstream
distributions and, beyond that, the applications.
Max Spevak is the community architecture manager for the Fedora
Project, Red Hat's free distribution of Linux, and needs to know
what is happening upstream in the kernel development as well as
what Red Hat is adding to the distribution. In addition,
applications included with Fedora need to be kept aligned with
these planned changes.
The recruitment of developers for the project has been revamped
by Fedora program manager John Poelstra. "What Poelstra has done
makes the process the same for a community developer who may be
studying in university or for Alan Cox [Fedora's star kernel
hacker].
If you want a feature in Fedora, you go onto the Fedora Wiki
where there is a section for each release. You write a brief
description of what your project involves: use cases,
implementation plan, requirements, specifications - standard stuff
for any technical project," Spevak explains.
Once registered, a deadline timetable is given for that release
and, if the feature is ready by the halfway point in the release
schedule, it is reviewed by a group called the Fedora Engineering
Steering Committee, formed from community contributors who have
been given leadership roles in determining the direction of
Fedora.
If the group feels the feature is in good shape, it stays in and
goes through a bug fixing and polishing mode ready for release.
Features deemed to be unready for advancement are rescheduled for
the next release in six months' time.
Dedicated
volunteers
Some projects need to be assigned, but the volunteer system
ensures dedication. Attracting the developers requires a bit more
work. "The more persuasive way is by presenting a vision that is
compelling to make engineers keen to identify themselves with it
that makes it work organically. Over the years, that has led to a
lot of important work getting done and two-thirds of Fedora is now
maintained by non-Red Hat engineers," Spevak says.
From the customer viewpoint, a lot has been made of the cost
benefits of free software. Simon Phipps, chief open source officer
and evangelist at Sun, denies that this is the main attraction. "It
is not about getting free stuff. If you hear a CIO say he is going
to reduce his costs by not having to pay for software licences any
more, then he has the wrong idea. Open source is about having
control over what you pay for, what you hire for, and what you do
not pay for. That is a sustainable way of keeping costs under
control as you are deploying software."
Open source is a financial model based on after-sales services
and training. Closed source products rely on licensing as the main
cash cow and every item used has to be paid for. If a database adds
another server, it has to be covered by a licence. With open source
a new server is provisioned and launched at no extra cost.
Open source offers a different approach to developing software
products. Transparency, openness and community, which are inherent
in open source projects, are becoming an ever more essential early
step in the transformation of a technology idea into a product fit
for business use.
Background information on
Linux
The core of Linux, the kernel, is developed by over 3,700
individuals worldwide, one of the largest development communities
ever assembled. The team releases a stable update quarterly with
the aim of including significant new features, increased device
support and better performance in each iteration.
The workforce comprises many individual developers, but it also
engages engineers from over 200 companies that normally compete
fiercely with one another in the market but work, for the most
part, harmoniously on the kernel project. The top five companies
contributing to the work are Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Intel and the
gatekeeper of the Linux world, the Linux Foundation.
The Foundation is a non-profit consortium that emerged from the
Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group in 2007.
Its charter is to foster the growth of Linux, originally developed
by Linus Torvalds in 1991.
The first full release of Linux 1.0.0 was in 1994 and it had
176,250 lines of code. The code base has since swelled to just
under ten million lines. Every day the kernel is changed, with an
average of 3,600 lines being added, 1,500 lines removed and 1,500
lines changed.