Working With Open Source Developers and Communities

Over the past few years, the amount of VC money pouring into the open source world has exploded. And I have had, at times, lingering concerns about how this money would be spent by the start-up vendors. I was hoping this wouldn't lead to the excessive spending and burn-rates of the late 90's.

But I have to say, it's been a very pleasant surprise to see open source vendors using their VC capital in creative ways to help developers and projects. As a result, developers have more incentive...and more input! Projects are getting better information from their users. And integration between various projects is getting easier as different project leads are given the chance to work with each other.

This was certainly true last week during the Monitoring SIG, organized by GroundWork Open Source in conjunction with BayLISA, the Bay Area's Large Installation Systems Administrators chapter. As I've mentioned before, network monitoring is complicated - so many of the IT operations directors appreciated this forum where they could work together to brainstorm, storyboard and plot the future path of development.

Another example of a creative open source community program is the OpenLogic Expert Community program. You might recognize OpenLogic as the open source management vendor that also provides support and indemnification on 160+ open source projects. In May, OpenLogic made some headlines because it said it would pay open source developers for 3rd tier support - and pay them with Xboxes upon request (this request was apparently not OpenLogic's idea - the idea came from the lead developers themselves).

Yet another example is from Funambol, the largest wireless open source project, which recently announced an innovative program called the Phone Sniper community program. This program provides incentives and recognition to community members for testing cell phones' ability to receive wireless data. Because of this program, already 150 phone models have been tested - which makes carrier open source adoption much more of a reality down the road.

So kudos to the organizations who are using their VC funding creatively and working closely with open source developers and communities - in the end, it's helping open source software take on some of the biggest IT challenges we face today.