Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Open Source Community: Needing to Be Needed

May 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Open Source Community: Needing to Be Needed

TAGS: Open Source

I just finished Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and have been reflecting on one of the closing dialogues between the protagonist, Jane Eyre, and her unlikely anti-hero, Mr. Rochester. (For those inclined to read the book - and you should (though you can largely skip 50% of the verbiage in the book - Bronte goes on and on and on with 2000-3000 words when 20-30 would do...a bit like me, I suppose :-) - you should skip this next section, as it gives everything away.

Jane Eyre, previously engaged to marry Rochester, had left him when she found out he was already married (to a lunatic wife that lived in his attic and occasionally set fire to people or stabbed them - Bronte obviously had an active imagination). After nearly a year's absence, she returns, only to find him blind (having lost his eyesight in a fire that his lunatic wife had started) and crippled. After some discussion, he asks her:

"...Jane, will you marry me?"

"Yes, sir."

"A poor blind man, whom you will have to lead about by the hand?"

"Yes, sir."

"A crippled man, twenty years older than you, whom you will have to wait on?"

"Yes, sir."

"Truly, Jane?"

"Most truly, sir." [At this point, Matt is blubbering in his airplane seat - I'm such a softie.]

"Oh! my darling! God bless you and reward you!"

"Mr. Rochester, if ever i did a good deed in my life - if ever I thought a good thought - if ever I prayed a sincere and blameless prayer - if ever I wished a righteous wish - I am rewarded now. To be your wife is, for me, to be as happy as I can be on earth."

"Because you delight in sacrifice."

"Sacrifice! What do I sacrifice? Famine for food, expectation for content. To be privileged to put my arms around what I value - to press my lips to what I love - to repose on what I trust: is that to make a sacrifice? If so, then certainly I delight in sacrifice."

"And to bear with my infirmities, Jane: to overlook my deficiencies."

"Which are none, sir, to me. I love you better now, when I can really be useful to you, than I did in your state of proud independence, when you disdained every part but that of the giver and protector." [My fellow Delta passengers are eyeing me suspiciously, wondering why a) a seemingly male personage is reading Jane Eyre and b) he is sniffling as he does so.]

"Hitherto I have hated to be helped - to be led: henceforth, I feel, I shall hate it no more. I did not like to put my hand into a hireling's, but it is pleasant to feel it circled by Jane's little fingers. I preferred utter loneliness to the constant attendance of servants; but Jane's soft ministry will be a perpetual joy. Jane suits me: do I suit her?"

"To the finest fibre of my nature, sir."

"The case being so, we have nothing in the world to wait for: we must be married instantly."

And so (nearly) concludes an excellent novel. And so, in turn, the novel reflects a great truth about people, generally, and open source software, specifically.

The best open source projects are those that invite and facilitate community. I've talked before about the right mechanics for facilitating communities, but one of the key ingredients - perhaps the key ingredient, is a sense of community within a project. People must feel that they belong. As with the TV show Cheers, "You want to be where everybody knows your name."

Lest this be passed off as a trite or easy-to-accomplish task, let me give some examples of how open source companies (including mine) routinely get this wrong.

1. Coding in private. It is a natural human tendency to want to keep our work private until we feel it suitably presentable to share. At Alfresco, we've fallen into this error several times. In one case, we were working on an integration with SugarCRM. Customers and partners kept asking for integration between the two, and we kept promising "We're working on it, and will be releasing it soon." But what they really wanted was both visibility into the project - they wanted to be able to go to our forge, or Sugar's, and see the work in progress - as well as the ability to participate in the project. We ultimately rectified this and posted the ongoing work, but we should have opened it up from the start. Perhaps, had we done so even before we started coding, a partner or customer would have taken up the project on their own, allowing us to spend our development resources elsewhere.

   Open source companies shouldn't behave like this. Our strength is in permeability. Roadmaps, pricing, code, etc. should be open, so that they can be forked or augmented in the best directions. Yes, there will undoubtedly be times when we develop initial betas of features/technology/products outside the public eye for competitive reasons, but generally, the inclination should be toward openness.

2. Investment in a community engenders devotion to that community. This seems intuitively wrong. One would think that those organizations which require least of us are those we'll prize most, but the inverse is actually true. Not to wax religious, but if you look at the fastest growing religions in the world, they're generally those that demand the most time, resources, etc. of their members. John F. Kennedy is famous for telling the American people not to ask what the country can do for them, but what they can do for the country. Parenthood is the same: it's absolutely insane that I have four children, since I'm one of the most selfish people on the planet when it comes to my time. The more they demand of me, however, the more I appreciate them. The principle seems clear: we want to give to those things that need us (or that we believe need us - my daughter, Greta, seems to do just fine without me :-).

   Now, in software, I'm not suggesting that CIOs will drop boatloads of cash on projects that are "needy." Not at all. Rather, I'm saying that there will be more psychological connection to software that allows us, even encourages us, to give to it. I can much more easily walk away from a failed financial investment than I can an investment of my time, reputation, and interest. Norm was never going to go to a different bar, not with how much Sam, Woody, Cliff, and the rest needed him.

3. Open source communities, then, will be strongest when they actively court new entrants. Related to #1 above, it's easy to structure a "community" as a gated community that allows only the privileged few (usually a company's employees and partners). This is no community at all.

   To encourage community, code needs to be modular (to make it easier to contribute in small doses - most third-party open source development is what I call "drive-by development"), forums need to be open and well-maintained (SugarCRM, which does commercial community better than anyone else I've seen, made its best investment in Clint, one of its founders, who actively works with its community to make it a welcoming place, and to ensure questions are answered), documentation needs to be solid (to make it easier to grok the code and get started), and it must quickly become community-maintained, if company-led (If the vast majority of the most active members remain the company's development team after the first 6-12 months, you're doing something wrong).

4. The company must be willing to relinquish (some) control. Related to the above, at some point the company must be willing to be forked. On its own forums. Otherwise, it doesn't feel like a community of equals, and no one likes to be subservient. I'm not arguing that a company should invite forking of its code, but rather that without a willingness to see this happen, it likely holds too strong a grip on its community, which will stifle interest in the community. Jane says it well when she alludes to her preference to be a full partner in the marriage (now that she's needed), rather than a doted on, half-servant to her husband. Strong communities take the risk of being forked (as Mambo/Joomla was in my ECM world). This is a good thing. Painful. But good.

Reading back on this, I may have taken Jane Eyre too far, but the core principle is true: one of the greatest "lock-ins" an open source company can hope to achieve is the emotional satisfaction a customer or partner has when it becomes a valued member of that project's community. Investing in the code one licenses makes for committed, happy customers. Community matters.

Posted by Matt Asay on May 31, 2006 06:20 PM

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