Dissing volunteers still a mistake
Despite all the money flowing into open source, dissing the volunteers is still bad for business.
Yet, just as it is in politics and journalism, dissing the volunteers remains a favorite parlor game.
Here it is from IDG's John Ribeiro. "Volunteer hackers still play an important role," he writes.
The word hacker originally meant someone who liked writing tight, working code, a "good hack." But it has come to mean a criminal, at best a self-absorbed dilletante, and Ribeiro uses the term constantly while discussing the volunteer issue with Red Hat's Michael Tiemann. Tiemenn's point, like mine, is that volunteers are vital.
The tone may be dismissive, but the point is well-taken. Honoring volunteers, managing volunteer efforts, and crediting free help can make the difference between success and failure, even with mature projects.
Take Debian, for instance. Matthew Garrett recently resigned as a committer to the project, complaining of a lack of managerial control. Here's what he wrote in his own LiveJournal:
The fairly rigidly enforced Ubuntu code of conduct probably helps a great deal in ensuring that discussions mostly remain technical. The distinction between core-dev and MOTU is a pretty explicit acknowledgment that not all developers are equal and some are possibly more worth listening to than others. And, at the end of the day, having one person who can make arbitrary decisions and whose word is effectively law probably helps in many cases.
There's a balance to be struck between organisational freedom and organisational effectiveness. I'm not convinced that Debian has that balance right as far as forming a working community goes. In that respect, Ubuntu's an experiment - does a more rigid structure and a greater willingness to enforce certain social standards result in a more workable community? In a few years, we ought to have an answer. I look forward to finding out.
The boldface is my own contribution, because it's a vital point. A volunteer organization is still an organization, and it's vital that an organization be organized properly.
What we may be talking about, however, is not so much a business model as a humanics model. Humanics is a discipline usually associated with the running of schools, zoos, and museums. Maybe it's time open source sought that kind of expertise.