Great post Matt. Completely agree. For a vendor backed oss project, community can mean many things…but often, it doesn’t mean “here is commit access, come and contribute code”.

Hi Matt!

The topic of “Organic vs Non-Organic” has been a recent hot point for development and deployment of open source. If a vendor is choosing to just toss the code over the wall there is a good chance that they will win little for their efforts.

On a similar note, fully organic source seems by some to be much more difficult to monetize. There is a reward relationship to how much energy you plan on putting into open sourcing your product, and few vendors grasp how to do this.

Here are a few reference articles for you:
http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/04/24/organic-vs-non-organic-open-source/
http://www.optaros.com/blogs/organic-open-source-jeff-whatcott-acquia

Cheers,
-Brian

It’s difficult to know whether explicitly not growing a community around a particular open source project is the right thing to do or not because you don’t say what the project is, but I can say for sure that there’s a fallacy at work here. Building a community around a product and “targeting ISVs and SIs and on growing its partner community” should not be an either/or proposition. In fact, a developer community done right should go a long way toward supporting ISVs and SIs — in fact, in many cases it may be all they need.

While the community is one of the strengths of the open source software development model, it isn’t the only thing that makes open source projects successful. Sometimes companies use the open source model for transparency or to encourage adoption or …

I think “community” is important but “developer commmunity” is just a part of that. Partners, ISVs and SIs are also a part of it. A vendor needs an ecosystem to thrive, open source (and poorly funded) more so than most. Look at Oracle. The number of companies that provide nothing but consulting or training for Oracle is staggering. Of course, there is also a certain amount of chicken and egg there.

LewisC

I think I agree with Lewis C that the core need is ecosystem leverage. That leverage usually comes through some blend of developer community, partner community, and user community. The investments should be modest and grow organically based on demand. Not every project is going to have a million outside developers. But if outside developers come knocking, the project should welcome them and provide them a way to build a community. Ditto for partners and end users.

[...] for Sun but could be better exploited through more community engagement. Keep in mid that community does not have to mean individual developers (and rarely does). There is a strong community of IHVs and ISVs and SIs with [...]

[...] could mean a developer community, but as noted previously, some vendors and products don’t actually lend themselves to a community of individual [...]