A Frog in the Valley

An insightful comment on "opening the source" reporting on an article on ZDNET by Dana Blankenhorn about Hyperic releasing it’s source code in the open.

Making a project available, much less workable, for a large number of unfiltered folks is pretty challenging, something like that highly interactive process of opening the can and trying to find just one juicy one for the hook.

This is mandatory reading for anyone thinking about this process.

We have to comb through it. Itâ??s a process you canâ??t undo. Once people start writing code to a codebase you have to have stability and continuity. So any changes we had to make in terms of orgnanizing things or ordering pieces.

There is contra-views to that, for sure, in the comments of the same Oreilly thread :

I think the code should lead and the community should follow - not in the sense of ‘throwing it over the wall’, but in the sense of pushing it over the wall and then joining it

I am in this process right now as we are preparing to release work we did last year for clients. One of my pain point about it is the amount of extra work that opensourcing a project involves (doing it correctly, not just "throwing it over the wall"). It’s about as much work as doing the project in the first place. It really puts the weaknesses of the traditionnal process in the spotlight, as you can't throw things "under the rug"… Anyhow, food for thought!

Tags: opinions, opensource