Today I’m witnessing the collision of my former self and who I have become. Today I’m at the Software Development Best Practices Conference and Exposition. When I was a software development manager for many years this was the one conference I was never able to attend (yes, I am bitter but that’s a whole other story). So I’m very excited and happy that I’m finally attending, even better I also get to share the SNAP Development Center story.
Leading up to the conference, I started to perceive that the Software Development community (as defined by this conference)and the Open Source community were separate. I observed that there didn’t seem to be many open source related sessions nor open source related exhibitors. Now that I’ve been to a few sessions, I have confirmed that these communities are fairly apart from each other. This really surprises me. On the one hand, as I led an open source project for nearly the last two years, it is easy to believe that everyone sees the benefits and value of open source software. On the other hand, most of the sponsors and many of their participants here earn their living from proprietary software. So it should be no surprise why these communities are not converging. There is some overlap between them, but I just some how expected more of it.
Two anecdotes from this morning illustrate how far apart these communities seem to be. First, one of the presenters was speaking on user interface design issues and habits when he excitedly shared that our browser was going to be coming with a tabbed interface. I was like, but, but, but, I’ve been using tabbed browsing for more than two years now. It then hit me (it took me a moment to switch my community viewpoint). He was speaking about Internet Explorer. I was completely shocked. Everyone I know uses Mozilla Firefox, so for me I implicitly thought that everyone did. It’s amazing how completely I have switched communities, and how that switch has changed my perception of what is normal.
This has made me think something I never contemplated before. I wonder how many Internet users have never heard of Firefox? If they have heard of it, I wonder if they have tried to download and install it? Finally, if they did try Firefox, do they still continue to use Internet Explorer? These questions are really tough to even conceive of, if one is locked into the open source world view. As a software developer and Internet user, it is almost trivial to find, install and switch to Firefox. So why aren’t more people using Firefox?
The second anecdote involves a discussion I had with a developer of a niche scientific software solutions. We were talking about C#, and he said he loved the language. However, he said that he would love it even more, but that he worried about people decompiling the intermediate language and gaining access to his source logic. I didn’t know what to say about that, except to mentally note that this was a great example of how far these two communities are apart from each other. Somehow, I believe that his perspective is now so foreign to me that I can no longer find a way to reconcile it with my new point of view. I also feel that perspective lock-in (from either community) is a risky situation, and that we should work together to minimize the adverse affects of the decisions we might make when stuck in either point of view.
Can these two world views live in peace?
Proprietary vs Open Source
You are so right on the seperation of Software Development community and the Open Source community.
How exactly can a professional developer make a living out of providing Open Source development? Open Source development can only be a hobby for someone who is able to make a living from other means. On the other hand, the development in the Open Source community has started to threaten the livelihood of professional developers.
Proprietary vs Open Source
I know several professional developers who do make their livings providing open source development. They see the product and the value they provide as not being primarily just the source code or distributed programs, but their expertise on the source, installation, integration, support, and customization.
Proprietary vs Open Source
My background: I've been developing proprietary software for over 25 years now, but I'm also a big fan and user of Open Source. For the last 10 years almost all of my development work has been on Linux.
The particular conference he's referencing is rather self-selecting. Few developers who build on Open Source systems are going to try to convince their boss to pay for a trip to a conference that tries to ignore the very existence of Open Source platforms and tools. It would be even more of a waste of money for the actual developers of Open Source software attend it, even if they had the money.
On an unrelated topic: just about every single time I've seen a software company build their software on top of proprietary tools from another company, they've gotten screwed by it somewhere down the line. If you don't have access to all the source code below you, you are at the mercy of one or more other companies and sooner or later you will regret it.
There are two kinds of proprietary software developers: those who have already learned this lesson, and those who have not yet figured it out. This conference is aimed squarely at the latter group.
It's much easier to sell expensive developer tools to people who haven't yet learned the downside of actually using them.
Charles Durst
"I don't think of you"
I am reminded of a story - I think it is about Oscar Wilde, but they often are - of someone desparate for Oscar's attention asking, 'But what do you think of me, Oscar?' and Oscar replying, 'I don't think of you'.
I think the vast majority of developers use at most a few Open Source / Free Software utilities, but would have never considered for a moment going to an Open Source model.
Obviously anecdotal evidence can only be anecdotal, but I do feel that there is a dangerous disconnect between the world that I know and live in and the world as you would imagine it if you believed the happy world of O'Reilly Network and similar tech-blogs.
I say 'dangerous' rather than 'amusing' because clearly people do sometimes make bad (for them) technical and life choices based on drinking the coolade.
I remember, in particular, getting a resume for someone who had basically left his job and gone through his life-savings developing some software for the Apple Newton, the covering letter basically said 'I had to abandon this because Apple canned the platform'.
I remember also a meeting of the IT strategy group at the last company I worked for (which was a business consultancy and a Mac shop, one of the biggest Mac shops in Britain in fact), where the senior 'tech guru' was saying that we needn't upgrade anyone's Macs as OpenDoc was about to take off so applications would shrink dramatically. This was just before OpenDoc basically imploded (and about 3 months later, after I had left the company, it switched to Windows).
I'm sure that if one read the right websites / magazines one could have easily formed the opinion (at those times) that the Newton was a thriving platform and that OpenDoc really was about to take off.
Obviously, neither of these examples are overwhelming tragedies, and there are plenty of other ways one can lose ones shirt / company but the happy world of Mac / Linux / Open Source blogs does have to be viewed with a certain health warning.
world of difference
i think i know the feeling from the other side of the room. i am part of the so called "proprietary" software developer community who started checking out open source recently. in the 100 or so fellow developers whom i know, i have hardly met anyone who has ever checked out open source. firefox is just another browser like opera or netscape and linux is only in server side. while i think "proprietary" guys are lagging behind by hanging on to ageing technologies, open source is defining the new ways and now probably there is more than some years worth of difference between these. while i don't think world will be taken over by one side in recent future, there has to be more awareness on the happenings and more involvement.