Q&A: Red Hat exec talks of challenges to open source

The biggest challenge for the open source community is that there are too few open source developers, according to Michael Tiemann, vice president of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc.

Tiemann was in India last week, the latest among a number of key executives at the Raleigh, North Carolina-based Linux vendor to visit the country, which has a large base of software developers, and also a number of companies that are investing in computerizing their operations. In a telephone interview from Mumbai, Tiemann talked to IDG News Service on issues relating to the open source movement, Red Hat’s strategies and his recent blog debate with Jonathan Schwartz, president of Sun Microsystems Inc., on Sun’s commitment to open source. Below is an edited transcript.

IDGNS: Worldwide, are you seeing a greater turnout of developers using open source ?

Michael Tiemann: The leading developer regions I have seen have been the U.S. and Europe. But I think that is going to be changing very rapidly. We are getting a lot of news from South America. Brazil, Venezuela, Peru have all either announced or are in the process of announcing mainstream Linux work for government. When Brazil puts their developers on open source, that is going to be a huge increase.

IDGNS: Are you seeing a lot of participation in open source development by Indian developers ?

MT: There is no question that there are Indian developers participating in open source, and Red Hat certainly has a number of them. We are localizing Fedora (the free open-source operating system project) for six different Indian languages, and we are getting a lot of participation from the community on that. At the same time, I don’t see as many people in leading positions in India wanting to be known as open source developers. Maybe it is a little bit like the way things were in the U.S. maybe 10 years ago. People work for companies, they feel loyal to the company, and what some people don’t understand is that one can be loyal to the company, and at the same time develop open source.

IDGNS: What is the biggest challenge for the open source community ?

MT: The biggest challenge right now is that there are not nearly as many open source developers as there could be. The biggest challenge right now is getting more people excited (about open source development). The open source community is a challenging environment to work in. Opinions are very strongly held, and it is not really who you are, but what you can do (that counts). Some developers respond positively to the meritocracy of open source, and some do not at all.

IDGNS: What are the management challenges involved when you scale to, say, 100 million open source developers spread across a number of countries ?

MT: There is a study from James Herbsleb at Carnegie Mellon University about both open source and proprietary projects. In this study 10 to 15 developers are typically responsible for 80 percent of the project. What that math tells you is that open source scales by being able to have more and more projects. I don’t ever think that there will be a 100 million people working on one library in Linux. Because of the super-modularity of open source, the ideal resource allocation for a 100 million developers is to be working on say 10 million projects.

IDGNS: Would there be a danger of forks in Linux as the number of developers increase ?