The state of open source: Avenues for acceptance

Roundtable: 11 leaders from the open source and vendor communities discuss the current open source climate and outline the challenges and opportunities ahead

 

Bruce Perens
Creator of the Open Source Definition
Co-founder of the Open Source Initiative

Perens: Well, we really are at the next step for a lot of software development. We define the best practices in software development today. After all, how many companies have software staff that are as motivated to work for them as the open source developers are motivated to make something that everybody shares?

Most proprietary software is written with the assumption that nobody's looking over the programmer's shoulder. With open source, the whole world is looking over the programmer's shoulder. Programmers write better code because they know that. Consider what happens today when a programmer is hired. How can any company tell much about the quality of their work? You can't get much good data out of their previous employer, if you can get any. But you can look at their open source code, and you can check out their interaction on the project's discussion lists and see if they are a team worker or a flamer. So, I think a lot of programmers realize today that their open source work is their résumé. That's a big quality incentive.

But what would I like to see for a next step? I would like to aim high. See that Macintosh desktop? It's got great consistency, it treats the user pretty well. Can we beat it? I think it's possible, but it would take strong leadership and a dedicated team.

When I left Pixar in 1999, Steve Jobs still didn't believe that open source could produce a good GUI at all. Two years later, he introduced Safari, which was derived from open source GUI work, while standing in front of a slide that said "open source, We Love It." I guess I won that argument.

Eric S. Raymond
Programmer, author, and
open source software advocate

Raymond: I think the need for languages and toolchains with provable security and assurance properties is growing acute. Though that need is not exclusively an open-source issue, the work to address it is going to have to be done in open source -- because who in their right mind is going to trust a closed binary blob?

Sam Ramji
Senior director of platform technology
Microsoft

Ramji: As a production methodology, open source development reduces to distributed collaborative software development with an implicit social model (power users, community developers, committers, leads, maintainers). This is largely independent of the scale of the project. Past models that have reached maturity have generally “arrived” when they are richly supported by tools (for example, object orientation and UML). We are already seeing team development tools on the market that are built around these distributed collaboration models, and include wikis, forums, and the typical features seen in open source forges.

Andy Astor
CEO
EnterpriseDB

Astor: If open source is going to become mainstream, then we are going to need guidelines, standards, and best practices around how to make a create a succesful open source project. And yet whenever you put too many guidelines, standards, and best practices on projects, they tend to lose their edge. Figuring out how to reconcile this contradiction is essential to moving open source forward.

Dave Rosenberg
CEO and co-founder
Mulesource

Rosenberg: Some of the tooling associated with group development needs to become more mature and needs to be able to be integrated effectively. Wikis and bug-tracking systems need to be integrated with build systems.

There are frameworks in place now that make distributed development easier, but it’s not yet easy.