How can software vendors engage with the open source community? An important step, according to Linus Torvalds, is to stop believing such a thing really exists and start engaging in the development process.

The Linux Foundation has kicked off its new Open Voices podcast series with an interview between executive director Jim Zemlin and its most famous employee: Linus Torvalds. The interview is available in MP3 and Ogg, as well as a transcript and provides some interesting insight into the Linux development process, Torvalds’ motivation, and the past and future of Linux (as well as the obligatory GPLv3 question - still “no”).

One section that stood out as fascinating to me from a CAOS Theory perspective is the conversation on community, and how companies can interact with the open source development process. With apologies for quoting in bulk, the transcript of that segment is worth reading in its entirety:

“Jim Zemlin: So, let’s talk a little bit about community, then, from this aspect of trust and I’d like to start by asking you a question about the term community itself. People throw the term community – you know, “Don’t do that. It will upset the ‘community’” or “The ‘community’ doesn’t accept this particular practice.’”

What – how do you define community? I mean, what is the way you look at that?

Linus Torvalds: I actually – I try to avoid using the word community because it’s misleading in so many ways. It’s misleading in the sense there is no one community; it’s everybody tends to have their own issues that they care about and they may – may or may not have anything to do with another person who’s ostensibly in the same community.

So, one misleading thing is thinking that people kind of share ideals and goals and that’s not true. It’s quite often the case that people have completely different goals; you have commercial vendors who have their very clear commercial goals and you have individuals that in the open source, so-called community, you often find individuals who really don’t like commercial entities, especially not the big ones. So, quite often the goals are very different.

And the other thing is, community tends to also be – become a – not just to see it as one entity, but you also see people as being inside and outside and that used to be especially – I think most companies have slowly started to learn, but it used to be a huge issues where companies kind of were talking about “How do we interact with the community?”

And there the community ended up being some external entity when the real answer always ends up being you don’t interact with the community, you just act as a member of this non-existent community. You really – you don’t interact with it, you are part of it.”

For organizations looking to involve themselves in the open source development process, it is therefore important that they stop thinking about the community as something that needs to be dealt with, and start thinking about the development process as something they need to engage with.

The conversation continued:

“Jim Zemlin: That’s something that I’d like to expand upon because a lot of times at the Foundation, corporations will come to us and ask, “How do we participate in the community? How do we work with the community?” and our response, similar to yours, is “You can be a part of the community.”

What advice would you have for corporations who have goals in participating in – let’s not use the word community, development goals?

Linus Torvalds: Usually, I mean, the easiest way is to find a person who is already a member of the development process or maybe not a very central one, but really – central enough that he’s been involved and knows how things works and basically bring that person into the company.

Quite often people, I mean, companies have those kinds of people inside already, especially if you’re in a tech company and you have interest in something like the Linux kernel, the reason you have interest in the Linux kernel probably has something to do with the kind of people you have working for you.

So, there probably already are people inside the company who know how things work.

Jim Zemlin: But you talked before about trust and why trust is important in terms of the influence you have to some degree in accomplishing what you want in the community.

Sometimes corporations don’t think about it in that way. They think, “Hey, if I assign people to work on this and I just throw resources at it, I’m going to accomplish my goal.”

How can these organizations, if they assign staff, build that trust? What should they tell their people who are participating out there?

Linus Torvalds: I don’t know if there is an answer to that question. {Laughter} I – if you think about trust the way you think about trusting a personal relationship, you don’t get trust and you don’t even really build trust knowingly. The trust either comes or it does not come and it largely depends on your actions.

So, the way to build trust is not to think of it as building trust, but trying to make sure that your actions speak louder than whatever you’re saying and maybe what your internal strategy is doesn’t matter. What your external actions are is eventually what will either give you trust or not give you trust.”

The full conversation can be found here, while John Mark Walker’s equally-fascinating 2006 article “There is No Open Source Community” is here. A second part of the conversation between Zemlin and Torvalds is promised, while future Open Voices podcasts will feature Novell president and CEO Ron Hovsepian; Martin Mickos, CEO of MySQL; and Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu Project