IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » August 2007

August 27, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Is that a real poncho or a Sears poncho?

TAGS: Open Source

Companies that respond to Open Source communities have the advantage: the old proprietary ways are over. IBM got this and has done well with projects like XCat and Eclipse. But, companies vary in their ability to participate in open source. Some companies aren't able to go beyond posting a demo on SourceForge. It's a demo for a commercial product because there isn't a community producing patches and product direction behind it. It's just a company calling itself open source for marketing gain without contributing to the community.

One sign of this is when the company moves the discussion forum for a project to a company web site instead of using one of the freely available public forums like SourceForge. The company wants control and leads--not a discussion. The user community, on the other hand, wants an open dialog. They spook easily. Witness the difference in downloads in a project where you have to enter you name and other info versus one that just allows you to download. The difference in downloads amounts to tens of thousand per month.

Dialog is critical today for a software company because software and the community it runs are no longer separate. This is the new landscape.

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Posted by Harper Mann on August 27, 2007 06:25 PM

August 16, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Open Source Outsourcing

TAGS: Open Source

Companies that are strong with the Open Source force gain code contributions and testing from their OS communities. This has become critical since feedback from users needs to be direct to the developers or feature requests get lost in the translation. When a bug has to travel from support -> operations -> marketing -> product management -> QA -> Eng management -> engineering -> coder, you get the telephone game effect. Avoiding this commercial vendor daisy chain is one of the underpinnings of Open Source projects that make them robust.

The smart software companies like Google and Red Hat know this and respond directly to their users. They have already made the mistake of not communicating and have suffered and learned. When you draw from the Open Source community, it’s like outsourcing in that you leverage the knowledge, interest and capability of the project team, rather than relying on yourself or our organization as the sole source of these. This is not the same as dealing with one-off tasks for customers (those that sap the energy of programmers, leaving them tired), because the Community’s stories and specs are more direct and closer to the true needs and capabilities of the users and developers engaged in the discussion. It's more efficient.

Posted by Harper Mann on August 16, 2007 04:16 PM

August 14, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Outsource!

TAGS: Open Source

I often see very smart programmers who are working hard but perhaps not so smart. It’s hard in they need to grind out code to get something done; it’s not so smart because they often code stuff a junior "code pig" could and would like to write. Why not hire someone and outsource the coding? This would relieve core smart people to address other problems.

Marketing guru Geoffrey Moore speaks of core vs. context, and recommends outsourcing anything that's not core. In an open source company, it’s important to define what the core activities are. I think there are several. The first is making sure you that you aren’t coding something that someone else in the open source community has already done. Another is making decisions and changes in project direction only after carefully discussing the changes with the core project team. Core is creating the design from the senior experienced engineers and context would be outsourcing as much as possible. Yet, many tech guys either can't engage an outsource team or are discouraged from doing so. What's up with that? And, what's the right mix today?

Posted by Harper Mann on August 14, 2007 01:36 PM

August 01, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Ask The Experts: It's What Project Leads Really Want

TAGS: Open Source

Project leads are good at a lot of things, like thoroughly understanding the ins and outs of their projects, keeping things on track, and getting problems solved. The downside of being so good at the job is that they become immersed in the details and demands of running their projects and spend less time face-to-face with the people who are using them (let's face it, email is not the same).

The people at GroundWork know the value of getting people together in person. For the second year in a row, they're sponsoring an Open Source Council, bringing together "lead developers from today's best-of-breed open source IT infrastructure and network monitoring projects" at LinuxWorld in SF, where they'll be able to talk in person, exchange ideas, and meet with users face-to-face.

The developers get a lot out of it. For instance, at last year's council, Matt Massie and Tobi Oetiker met in person for the first time, and discussed a change to the RRDtool database schema that would make Ganglia more efficient. Tobi returned to Switzerland, thought about it, and implemented the changes Matt proposed.

Plus, as a developer, I can tell you that there's a lot of value in meeting with users face-to-face. It's the best way to understand how your software is being used and what issues users are facing. And if you're a user, you can get answers from those questions you've been dying to ask, straight from the lead developer of projects like Dojo, Nagios, Cacti, and Ganglia.

You can "Ask the Experts" at LinuxWorld this year during the following activities: at hour-long "Ask the Expert" sessions throughout Tuesday, August 7 and Wednesday, August 8 at the GroundWork booth in the exhibits area (Booth 501) and at a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at 6PM on Tuesday, August 7. Complete information about the Open Source Council, including the Ask the Expert schedule is here.

Posted by Harper Mann on August 1, 2007 03:45 PM