The open source software community has been maturing in recent years. At a meeting yesterday one participant referred to a “traditional Linux company” without any irony.
The opportunities for open source and free software remain huge. But so do the challenges.
More in my Wednesday column from the O’Reilly Open Source Convention.
The conference officially kicks off this morning. Look for updates later today.
UPDATE: Fred Baker is calling himself a “Gadfly at Large” for his keynote this morning at the conference. He understates his influence.
Baker’s record in the telecommunications industry is extraordinary. So when he says that the open source community has morphed from “a community with a particular ethic to a methodology and a set of people who use it,” listen to him.
The open-source methodology, Baker says, is a good one. It has produced a large number of great tools.
“But once it hits the street and has to be used by real people, it gets picked up and deliverd by companies that deliver stable products,” he observes.
“They have to freeze the code and do things in a way that is going to ultimately meet their customers’ needs.”
Baker implores the open-source developers to recognize people they often forget — end users. Open source isn’t well adapted for neophytes. The software doesn’t behave predictably from system to system. Manuals are incomplete, poorly written or nonexistent.
Where is open source going?
It remains a wonderful place for exploration, Baker says — “exploring ideas, developing concepts that can be turned into really cool tools that can be developed and used by real people.”
That means partnerships with business, he says. It means “taking cool ideas and productizing them in some way.” It means figuring out “how we can take this methodology and cool tools, and how can we make them really available for people who are nowhere near as sophisticated as ourselves.”
Baker’s message clearly isn’t meeting with universal approval. Many of the people here are fond of free software, and the ideology of free software. They know that the world is changing. I’m not sure they like it very much.