451 CAOS Theory *
A blog for the enterprise open source community

Sometimes a developer community isn’t the answer

, August 12, 2008 @ 6:26 am ET

I was in San Francisco at the tail-end of last week and was fortunate to have some time to meet up with Josh Berkus, a member of the PostgreSQL core team and, until recently, a Sun employee.

Our conversation covered a lot of ground, including his reasons for leaving Sun (he didn’t go into detail but suffice to say he’s working a business idea), the future of the database market (more choice, more horizontal scaling, more use of specialist databases), the future of PostgreSQL (as a development platform), the level or authorization afforded to the Drizzle project, and the future of Sun.

I won’t go into the latter now, but the threads are there to be joined together.

We finished up our conversation talking about the attempts of one particular vendor (not Sun) to build a community of developers around its recently open sourced product. Given Josh’s involvement in the PostgreSQL community and the recent assertion that open source is “all about community” some may be surprised to find that Josh was arguing against the company putting its effort into building a developer community.

Why? It comes down to the strengths and weaknesses of a certain project. For those that are developed in the open like Linux and PostgreSQL, the developer community is vital. For those that are mainly developed by the employees of a vendor, it is less important.

Some may point out that vendors that fail to exploit the community development model fully are failing to enjoy the full benefits of open source and are keeping their development and marketing costs higher than necessary. Josh argued that idea that development costs are always lower for open source projects is a fallacy and that, depending on the vendor, the benefits do not always outweigh the costs.

He argued that for the vendor in question it would be doubtful whether an expansion of the developer community would contribute meaningful benefits and greater commercial adoption and that it might actually distract the company’s attention away from serving its core customer base.

The company would be better served, he believed, in targeting ISVs and SIs and on growing its partner community, encouraging them to take advantage of the availability of the code to increase their expertise in, and the overall quality of, the product.

Maybe the vendor in question is the exception, but it was interesting to hear someone who is so involved in a community project arguing against attempting to build a development community for the sake of placating the criticism of rivals.

Overall the message to vendors is that what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for all. That and the fact that ‘community’ does not always have to mean ‘developer community’. Vendors should play to their strengths rather than following the crowd.

Permalink | Technorati Links | Bookmark on del.icio.us | digg it
Comments (11) Categories: Business strategies,Software

11 Responses to “Sometimes a developer community isn’t the answer”

  1. Savio Rodrigues says:
    August 12, 2008 at 7:20 am

    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”.

  2. Brian Aker says:
    August 12, 2008 at 9:38 am

    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

  3. Jeffrey McManus says:
    August 12, 2008 at 12:17 pm

    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.

    • Matthew Aslett says:
      August 12, 2008 at 4:20 pm

      The point is not to avoid growing a developer community but to let it grow naturally and invest the limited resources where they will have the most impact. It’s a matter of prioritizing investment.

  4. Stormy says:
    August 12, 2008 at 5:32 pm

    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 …

  5. LewisC says:
    August 12, 2008 at 7:06 pm

    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

  6. Jeff Whatcott says:
    August 13, 2008 at 10:38 am

    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.

  7. 451 CAOS Theory » What Sun should do says:
    November 27, 2008 at 8:59 am

    [...] 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 [...]

  8. 451 CAOS Theory » Commercial open source community strategies in 2009 and beyond says:
    January 12, 2009 at 10:43 am

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