Dabbling in Code OK, Panelists Say
Call open-source work beneficial to all
By Esther Schindler
November 1, 2006 —
(Page 1 of 2)
Some application development managers are glad to have their employees participate in the open-source community, working to enhance some project. However, others may feel that such activities are distracting from the “real work” that’s on the developer’s desk.
That’s the wrong attitude to adopt, said industry luminaries in a panel discussion held during the Gartner Open Source Summit in Phoenix in October. In addition to the predictable topics of enterprise adoption of Linux, open- versus closed-source guidelines and software security,
the conference attendees were given specific advice in the “Mastermind Panel” about the relationship of an enterprise with its employees who may wish to contribute to open-source projects.
The programmers who write open-source applications are no longer lone gunmen working on their own, if that was indeed ever an accurate description. Mike Millinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, said 85 percent of its committers are full-time employees somewhere, who are paid to write the code. Eclipse may be an anomaly (45 percent of its 740 committers work for IBM, from which the project was spun off), though less so than it used to be (two years ago, 80 percent of committers were IBMers, according to Millinkovich). Yet, those percentages don’t appear to be far off. Based on a hands-raised survey of the IT audience, at least half have employees as committers in open-source projects.
One reason for managers to encourage developers to participate in the open-source community is “to drive this as a [programmer] skill set,” said Brian Behlendorf, founder and CTO of CollabNet and former director of The Apache Foundation.
Stuart Cohen, CEO of Open Source Development Labs, suggested that employees should be expected to investigate open-source solutions as part of their personal development, in the same way you may expect them to learn about tools for Visual Studio programming or to gain Cisco certification.
By doing so, commented Yefim Natis, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst, “you develop internal expertise in the products the company relies on.” It also enables enterprises to ensure that the open-source software to which the company is committed continues to provide functionality that’s internally valuable.
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