Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Mark Shuttleworth - Open Voices - Linux Foundation Podcast

Jim Zemlin of Linux Foundation interviews Mark Shuttleworth. There's So much great stuff here, you have to give it a listen.

Here's one snippet:

I think one thing that’s really important to understand is the difference between someone who works full-time for you and someone who works as part of a community contributor to your project that you’re interested in.You get very different kinds of contributions from those two. Some companies, I think, think that once they open source a product or if they join the open source community, then other people will do all the work that they don’t want to do and that’s only really true of certain kinds of things.I think what you get from the long tail of contributions in a community is a fleshing out, a rounding out of your product, a rounding out of the platform.So, if you’ve written, you know, an adapter to make something work with one database, then the community might well contribute extensions to that to make it work with two or three other databases; things that are nice to have for you, but not essential on your critical road map.And the flip side is that, you know, if you want to do rigorous QA, you won’t find that coming from the community, but you will find lots of interesting little QA tidbits coming from the community.And so, I think companies that understand how to interact and engage with a community, how to have their own full-time guys doing the things that they will do best, but also expose enough of the platform, expose enough of the project for other people to come in and do interesting bits of work tend to do better.

read more | digg story

No comments:

Add to Technorati Favorites