Dabbling in Code OK, Panelists Say

Call open-source work beneficial to all

By Esther Schindler

November 1, 2006 —

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.

In another “hands-raised” survey of conference attendees, nearly every participant said they’d looked at the source code on an open-source project, and about 35 percent said they changed the code and put it into production. Only one attendee (of a few hundred) had outsourced that change.

Another advantage, suggested Behlendorf, is that enterprises may gain more than code. “It becomes an educating process in more than the software,” he said, such as helping developers figure out the right way—or at least another way—to do change management.

Bringing open-source solutions into the firm can be a gradual process, said Millinkovich. First, managers should work with the company’s legal department “to establish a framework whereby developers can post to lists, such as to ask a question or report a bug.” This may require a few go-rounds with company lawyers before an understanding is reached, he said, but it makes developers feel that it’s safer to participate.

One option that won’t work—but which your lawyer may suggest—is to shield the identity of developers who contribute to a project. That won’t fly, said Millinkovich, because “we have to validate the provenance of every line of code.” It simply can’t be kept secret.

However, depending on the code your developers work on, there may be more or less visibility. Apache has a “community over code” philosophy, for example, pointed out Millinkovich, while in the Eclipse community, “we wrestle with it all the time.” For example, one open-source project may encourage contributors to write with their “work” e-mail ID, and others have more anonymity in discussion forums.

To establish a culture of open source in a company that is traditionally reliant on closed source, recommended the panelists, look for pilot projects with developers who sit in different locations. That will encourage the enterprise to learn to use the “electronic conversations” and move them into a more collaborative environment.

Esther Schindler has been writing about technology and software development topics since 1992.

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