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Nov/11

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Why does an Open Source approach not work in (most) companies?

9 Comments · Posted by Christian in Outside the box

Open Source communities are amazing. Never experienced such a helpful and dedicated environment anywhere else. Despite scratching their own itches Open Source minded people tend to teach, answer and help other people and there’s no money involved.

I always try to get something of that mindset into corporate communities.. and fail.

It’s not hard to imagine that i.e. all developers of a company get involved with Open Source projects. It’s also easy to imagine that separate teams or departments share code and generally help each other despite working on different things.

You can see this working in some companies. Mostly start-ups that formed within the Open Source space or have been connected to it from the start. But you rarely see it happening in bigger or older companies.

Even if the individual developers are using Open Source and might contribute in their free time the mindset just won’t set in within the work time. Now why is that?

My current guess is that the mindset you find within the Open Source communities is being had by an already selected group of people.

What I mean is: from the quazillion developers in the world only a few are involved somehow in the Open Source world. The rest is not.

When you look at the developers of a company you will look at a share of the developers of the world and probably find a similar ratio of people who come with an Open Source mindset. The majority might not get the point or isn’t interested.

So how can you change that?

I see only two options. First one would be to emphasize the topic constantly, support those who share your mindset and maybe set goals that include Open Source thinking. The second way to change would be to change your hiring process and start openly judging people by their Open Source contributions.

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  • http://www.codenugget.org b00gizm

    I’m not quite sure what you mean.

    As VP of Engineering, does that mean that a) I have to encourage my team to contribute in Open Source in their free time, or b) do I have to convince the board that the company should open source some of our underlying technologies?

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @b00gizm I’m not necessarily talking about contributing to Open Source but to applying the same mindset within the company. For some reason i.e. distributed teams that meet every six months or so don’t work together nearly as well as Open Source contributors that haven’t met at all.

  • Pedro

    IMHO , open source projects has not a heavy hierachical structure. Is like horizontal leveled organizations. All people can contribute freely, in a company this is more dificult. ;)

    Cheers!!

  • http://www.codenugget.org b00gizm

    @ Christian

    So what exactly is “open source mindset”?

    I see people contribute in open source for a shitload (*scnr* ;) of reasons. On the one end there are people contributing to open source, because they really want to give something back to the community. On the other end, they are people who “contribute” something because of their ego. When I browse new stuff on Github and stumble across those projects, I almost can hear them saying “Look at what I’ve done! I’m awesome!”.

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @Pedro if your sources are decoupled there is nothing holding you back. :)

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @b00gizm the ego part of it is clearly something you can leverage from. if you provide an environment where people can be exposed with what they’ve accomplished and get their share of fame and glory you will motivate them. See the Symfony Connect thing. It plays all the right keys. :)

  • http://www.craftitonline.com Luis Cordova

    you hit on the nail man, again, I am trying to propel a php group here and it has been a blur of selfserving time: “what do I take” always attitude, never thinking in petting an OS repo on github. It is very small that os mindset dev %.

    That is why when like minded os devs meet it is like they relate even better because they know what they are doing is nothing common, it is rare, and they know they can even help each other because of that because else they will come to a higher risk of extinction.

    Man! sf2 FTW!

  • http://marsbomber.github.com marsbomber

    I’ve worked in a decent sized company. We had knowledge sharing sessions every week. It’s a good way to get people together and share their ideas, lead to this open mindset you talked about.

  • http://test.ical.ly Christian

    @luis cheers mate. maybe you’re right. :)

    @marsbomber sounds great. I think it needs a few enthusiasts to motivate the lot. :)

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