Garage, basement, or bedroom, this FUD flows along the same path: open source software is written by some lone hobbyist in a torn Duran-Duran teeshirt, swilling Dr. Pepper into the wee hours while the weak light of a computer monitor reflects off his (it’s always a “he” in these scenarios) pallid forehead.
In other words, this FUD hints that OSS is amateurish, and any OSS program is one car wreck (or law school scholarship) away from losing its developer base — what I call GIAG (Guy in a Garage) software.
This FUD hits decision-makers right square in the neocortex with a visceral approach to what administrators fear most: making a highly visible, spectacularly bad decision. Who would want to explain to staff, the public, board members, and local government (or the library press, for that matter) that they had selected kiddy software for their most mission-critical applications?
As with most FUD, this one takes the truth and flips it jelly-side down. As library technologist Ed Corrado observed on his eponymous blog, “Someone must have a big basement to fit IBM or Sun Microsystems in it!” Many big companies (including legacy library software companies) rely on OSS to some degree, if they are not major OSS powerhouses such as Red Hat. If OSS development is happening in these companies, it’s going on in the same cubicles and offices as the rest of the development.
Enterprise-quality open source software — with its large developer communities, high security, and rapid application development, among other native characteristics — is so commercially viable that even Gartner, the squarest of business analysts, has given a cautious tip of the derby to OSS. A recent Gartner report observes that “The perspective of the open-source software model as an IT counter-culture movement is quickly becoming outdated as more markets increasingly incorporate open source into mainstream IT solutions.” Gartner also estimates that “At least 70% of commercial software packages will include some elements of open-source technology by 2012.”
Another strength of open source that this FUD tries to hide is that there is almost no limit to the number of skilled developers who can participate in its coding that large developer communities grow around good open source software. A recent version of Linux had over 3,500 developers contribute code.
I keep saying I’d like to see a developer in every library. That’s a vision, maybe one we will never achieve. But there is no challenge in library automation we couldn’t solve if we had a brain trust that size. One of the “happenings” for Evergreen is that for over a year we’ve had significant code participation from outside the original “core four.”
Meanwhile, out in LibraryLand, though we have very few developers –for an “information” profession, at least — we are seeing a flowering of creative effort. I wrote about some of the current crop of projects in an article just published in School Library Journal.
It ain’t just developers (in garages or elsewhere)!
Not that we all don’t have lots of affection for library software developers and the important work they do, but it stands repeating that any healthy OSS “community” is really a series of affinity groups much broader than its developers.
Contributions to OSS come in all shapes and sizes: users who contribute their domain knowledge to system design, documentation writers, trainers, educators, and so forth — or even just the “many eyes” that can observe and comment on the development process. Someone like Dan Scott of Laurentian, with his excellent knowledge of acquisitions processes, is indispensable to the work of lead Evergreen acquisitions developer Bill Erickson. (Sometimes the contribution is financial, and there’s nothing wrong with that, either.)
So what’s wrong with Dr. Pepper?
One tiny grain of truth in this FUD has to do with the nature of creativity. I think it was Roy Tennant who once observed that nothing was ever invented by a committee.
At the earliest stages of the creative process, there often is just one person with an idea. What happens next is partly a question of luck and timing (which is often a form of luck). But it is also a question of temperament and skill.
I’m no big fan of The Cathedral and the Bazaar — I find it windy and very much “insider baseball,” among other problems — but Eric Raymond does do a good job of talking up the human aspect of OSS development. He points out that all new software programs begin with a developer — but great OSS projects happen because the original developers had the human skills to build community around their ideas.
In any event, the next time you hear this FUD, think about what you really know about the software under discussion. Because I’m sitting three feet from a rosy-cheeked library software developer, in a nice ground-level office with a birdfeeder outside the window.
