In the last few days 2 fairly high profile companies have open sourced parts of their products; Facebook and Symbian. Why is this important? For the average person on the street they probably won’t care, but for other companies and individual nerds out there it can be a very good thing.
Facebook’s HipHop has the potential to lower infrastructure requirements for PHP based web applications, and Symbian being open sourced provides developers for mobile platforms the ability to more easily produce tools and improvements for Symbian. For Facebook and Symbian the benefit is that they can take these improvements and use them internally. There’s also the potential to find new hires from outsiders who may work on the project.
However, the thing that companies need to understand most is that you just can’t throw the source code over the metaphorical wall and wait for magical things to happen. Without building a community around the project it will never develop into anything other than a burden and potentially even a public relations nightmare. If you don’t understand why a community is important then you may well be open sourcing your product for the completely wrong reasons and I’d suggest that you take a long hard look at why you’re thinking it’s a good idea.
So how do you build a community? Its a hard thing to do right and is precisely why various companies that produce Open and Free products employ Community Managers. However, if you’re starting off small and want others to contribute we can suggest that you follow these golden rules:
- Communication. Mailing lists. IRC. Development needs communication and these are still the popular choices.
- Make sure you have some documentation, or a group of people who understand the code so that it can be explained to new or potential contributors.
- Be friendly. If someone wants to help they’re going to be spending their own time to get a new feature into the software.
If you intend to do all these things then you already understand why you want to open source your product. Get all these things right then theres a good chance your company will benefit, both in terms of code and in terms of public relations. Hadoop or Lucene, originally from Yahoo, are particularly good examples of how to do it right. They both now have large communities and both Yahoo and others have benefited massively as a result of the contributions.
Tags: hip hop, open source, thoughts
