Ctrl key again.

Spent a good part of yesterday’s lunch re-reading the various posts around “corporate control of community projects” and especially the excellent post from Quim. The checklist that he puts out is a nice way of wrapping one’s head around as to what an “open organization” means and thusly, what it should be doing diligently. This article about “Sun and corporate open source” is also worth a read in the same context.

However, having heard (second-hand) about the recent Android and OpenSource related faux pass from Google, it may well be that the tension between how much to control and what to give away will remain for a while. In fact, doing over-the-wall type of Open Source-ing and attempting to “expand the community” is a trap that any company can fall into due to complacency. The bottom-line perhaps is to do away with the glorified notion of expanding the community and focus more on working “in” the community so as to get more valuable insights into projects, processes and products.

Working in the community of consumers, contributors and critics has the benefit of making it impossible to get away with infrastructure that is available to a select few or, perhaps unavailable to anyone outside the company. What is far more interesting for me is that the over-the-wall or “gated community” kind of development is prevalent more for products and infrastructure related Open Source projects than projects which deal with services. And, the reason for that might be a lack of stringent rules being applied on part of the company / teams from the company involved in this aspect.

The preliminary indicators of such a problem is forking upstream tools for enhancements and not making incremental public releases that would benefit from the experience of others. This of course soon degenerates into having closed meetings and closed mailing lists that are available to the select few. And the final outcome of such a process is the inevitable code push over-the-wall in a take it or leave it approach.

This is however, completely different from pushing in too many contributors (in a torrent) into an upstream project with the well-intended but uncontrolled urge to make things stable and predictable. That happens as well.

Yet, nearly all the sad cases of overuse of the ‘Ctrl’ key is more to do with the lack of institutional knowledge about how to produce Open Source software than an attempt to terminate with extreme prejudice.

Next up – a small note about why it is not right for bodies entrusted to be resource centers to be dipping their fingers into everything under the sun in the pretext of expanding the community.