OpenSource communities go west
My work often requires me to select (or develop) different kind of technologies. Every time I’ve got to make a choice between “traditional approach” and “OpenSource approach”, the questions I ask to myself are (more or less) always the same:
- Is this new technology able to stay alive for a long long time?
- Is it able to keep itself on the top of most used technologies?
- Is it able to move people from old style approach into new OpenSource world?
- …
…but since a couple of months ago, I’ve started asking to myself another important question:
- Is this technology able to keep close to itself key people (basically the “community”)? Or it is only able to keep the “maintainers”, but not the innovators?
I think the ask for this question is very important to know the future of a product. Some time ago, I’ve blogged a post about “80% and 20% of developers“, where the real innovators are (IMHO) only a few people, and lose these people could be the end of a project.
I think OpenSource community needs to move over new and exciting technologies day by day. And innovators ARE OpenSource community. No way to keep a good innovator stopped to a technology for long time. Technology has to change and grow up fast if it wants to benefit by these extraordinary geeks.
So, here’s why you have to run out of town from static “huge” technologies (usually defined “enterprise”): best guys, best developers, best architects need to “go west”, to find new lands, looking for new opportunities to innovate world and make it better.
RedHat and Fedora (and, of course, Byte-Code! 
) are the best example I know (and they rock! Great innovations in Fedora make RedHat a REAL enterprise technology)
OpenSource community should be considered a “quality guarantee” by everyone, also when it try to head straight for new and unknown ways.
Just my two cents 
