Dru Lavigne from the BSD community talks about the 'maturity' of open source projects. Often people think of the maturity of the code, but she talks about the maturity of the community. One of the factors is the involvement of people who are not coders, per se. They bring expertise from other realms. How well the community is accepting of and open to their contributions, she argues, is one of those factors in measuring the community's maturity.
Entrepreneurs, ideas people, are changing these communities. I do sense there is a zeitgeist. I see this conversation happening in other OSS communities, but I know the Drupal community best.
Dries from the Drupal community posted some articles about business models:
And, coincidentally, Liza Kindred from Lullabot (a large Drupal shop) posted an article with this same title: Show me the money!
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/show-me-money
There has to be a way to make this work, while still maintaining the quality of the community at the core, for contributions. It has to be sustainable.
I was pondering this today, while listening to Jim Corbet of the Linux community talking about contributing to Linux. He specifically addresses companies in his webinar: *managers* need to understand open source and the processes of communities. It's fundamental.
I took some notes from his webinar here:
http://heather.drupalgardens.com/content/bootstrapping-developers-drupal
I'm keen to understand this from the perspective of an educator, as I see some of this as a learning gap that can be traversed.
I think not only they can, but they should be teaching open source methods and practices. And I think they could be teaching within open source communities.
There are alot of soft skills involved in interacting with an open source community that are professional real-life skills. They can, as Honey suggests, tough it out and learn it on their own... But why can't we integrate this into formal education?
Graduates are often left to do this exact thing: after they leave school, they finally start developing the 'real' skills they need.
Bringing students into the <em>wild</em> of open source during their education can reap great benefits for them. They can find like-minds, make professional connections for work, make personal connections for support- and find their way in the world.
There are many are skills and abilities that can be developed, beyond the code.
Authored Comments
Dru Lavigne from the BSD community talks about the 'maturity' of open source projects. Often people think of the maturity of the code, but she talks about the maturity of the community. One of the factors is the involvement of people who are not coders, per se. They bring expertise from other realms. How well the community is accepting of and open to their contributions, she argues, is one of those factors in measuring the community's maturity.
Entrepreneurs, ideas people, are changing these communities. I do sense there is a zeitgeist. I see this conversation happening in other OSS communities, but I know the Drupal community best.
Dries from the Drupal community posted some articles about business models:
- http://buytaert.net/on-business-models-for-drupal-distributions
- http://buytaert.net/joomla-vs-drupal-business-models-and-commercial-ecosystem
And, coincidentally, Liza Kindred from Lullabot (a large Drupal shop) posted an article with this same title: Show me the money!
http://www.lullabot.com/blog/show-me-money
There has to be a way to make this work, while still maintaining the quality of the community at the core, for contributions. It has to be sustainable.
I was pondering this today, while listening to Jim Corbet of the Linux community talking about contributing to Linux. He specifically addresses companies in his webinar: *managers* need to understand open source and the processes of communities. It's fundamental.
I took some notes from his webinar here:
http://heather.drupalgardens.com/content/bootstrapping-developers-drupal
I'm keen to understand this from the perspective of an educator, as I see some of this as a learning gap that can be traversed.
I think not only they can, but they should be teaching open source methods and practices. And I think they could be teaching within open source communities.
There are alot of soft skills involved in interacting with an open source community that are professional real-life skills. They can, as Honey suggests, tough it out and learn it on their own... But why can't we integrate this into formal education?
Graduates are often left to do this exact thing: after they leave school, they finally start developing the 'real' skills they need.
Bringing students into the <em>wild</em> of open source during their education can reap great benefits for them. They can find like-minds, make professional connections for work, make personal connections for support- and find their way in the world.
There are many are skills and abilities that can be developed, beyond the code.