Someone recently asked me a few question about corporate participation
in open source communities and I thought I'd share my thoughts on this
topic here.
Are there differences between an open source project done for a
corporation and one done for personal reasons?
There are many different ways to run an open source project, led by a
corporation or by someone else. Some projects that are run by
corporations have few outside contributors. This is often the case with
projects that require copyright assignment (i.e. contributors have to
assign their copyright to the corporation). These projects may not gain
all the benefits of a true open source community, such as outside
contributions or high levels of peer review. However, they may still be
very successful projects and may have high levels of quality.
Projects done by a corporation may have better planning and may have
more resources than other projects. When a corporation, especially a
large one, starts or becomes involves in a project it can also give
credibility to the project and attract a lot of interest to the project.
This means that projects done by corporations may have a bigger impact
and might also be more visible in terms of publicity.
How do corporations successfully utilize an open source
community?
Corporations can benefit from an open source community in many ways.
For example, they can often find people who will review their code or
make code contributions. If people become excited about what the
corporation does, they might also spread the word and create viral
marketing for the corporation. Establishing a community around one's
project is often also a good way to identify people to hire since you
already have experience working with them and know their capabilities.
How do open source communities successfully utilize their corporate
relationships?
Corporations can make several unique contributions. For example, large
corporations can use their name to attract attention to a project and
give it credibility. Furthermore, corporations have some capabilities
that personal contributors often don't have access. They may have
special testing equipment (such as servers with thousands of CPUs or
hard drives) or access to a testing lab where a professional usability
test can be done. Finally, corporations can sponsor developer
conferences, which are typically very effective means for the community
to come together and work on activities together.
It is important for projects to remember that corporations are not
charities and that they will invest in an open source project for a
reason. Therefore, they have to ensure that the corporation will get
tangible outcomes from their involvement or sponsorship, otherwise they
may not stay involved in the long run.
What are the risks for a corporation when working with an open
source community?
One risk is that the code (or other form of contribution) is not
accepted. However, this is a risk any contributor to a project faces.
Before making any sort of contribution, it is therefore important to
become familiar with the project and its culture. Every project has
their own "do's" and "don'ts" that have to be followed.
Another risk is that a corporation will invest in a community project
that later on is abandoned by the community. However, in this case, the
corporation could take the lead and continue to maintain the project.
What are the risks for an open source community when working with a
corporation?
One potential risk is that the corporation will assert too much control
over the project. It's important for projects to ensure that the
community as a whole has influence over the direction of a project
rather than one particular player.
Are certain certifications needed in order for someone
to participate in open source projects for a corporation?
Certifications are not needed to get involved in or start a project.
However, it is important to become familiar with the open source
community and the project one wants to contribute to. A good first step
is to read the book Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel which
is
available online. As a next
step, the community in which someone wants to get involved in should be
studied, for example by reading the mailing list archives. This will
help to become familiar with the culture of a project as well as the
mechanisms to contribute to the project.
How do open source communities communicate and collaborate with
corporations?
In the best case, employees from corporations would interact in the
project like any other contributor. That is, they should use the
existing communication channels, such as mailing lists, IRC or developer
gatherings. Many companies are good at working "with the community" but
the ideal scenario is for a company to be part of the community and to
work "in the community", just like other contributors. This is the most
effective way for them to make changes to the code and project.
Of course, not every corporation will get involved in a project
directly. That's why it makes sense for projects to collaborate with
corporations in other ways. For example, projects can talk directly to
companies to get samples of their hardware in order to add support for
them in their software. Projects can also work directly with
corporations to find out how their project can better meet the needs of
enterprise users.
A customer called me a while back.
They have a pretty high-end NAS (2U server with external disk
enclosure) that they use for most of their needs: both document and
other storage for management types, as well as storage for their EDA
cluster. People familiar with EDA tools will know that they are pretty
disk intensive. They tend to require shitloads of diskspace, preferably
at high performance.
The problem was that extending the storage space of this high-end NAS
device is rather expensive. Supported disks only come at 300G units with
prices that are higher than the cheap TB disks available today for the
desktop market; and while the price and performance of those disks is
worth it for the EDA requirements, the number of people storing
documents and similar on the same device is not so high that performance
would be an issue.
Thus, what they wanted was a cheap solution to augment, rather than
replace, their current storage solution, with the focus being on low
cost at the possible expense of performance and, since bacula runs well
there, reliability.
They were quite surprised when I offered them a solution based around
a QNAP device; they had expected a price, without hard disks, of about
three to four times the price of the QNAP, and therefore were very happy
with this suggestion. Unfortunately, the devices produced by this
manufacturer that are supported by Lenny, the current Debian stable
release, were EOL'd just before we
placed the order; however, their replacements will be supported by
Squeeze, the next release, and with a bit of help from Martin Michlmayr,
we were able to install Lenny with a somewhat more recent kernel. This
drove the price up somewhat, both because the newer devices are a few
tens of euros more expensive, and because we agreed to pay Martin to
prioritize work on the specific device that we'd need, so that we
wouldn't have to wait for him to get around to it.
As of this Thursday, the device, which had finally arrived after some
initial delays, has been installed. Unfortunately, one of the disks that
they'd bought was DOA; but they had
the foresight to buy five, rather than four, disks, so that was not a
major problem. In fact, the only real issues that I ran into were this
one arm-specific
bug, and the fact that the high-end NAS device is still running
etch, which means that rsync --acl won't work. That means I'll
have to go back there soon to do an upgrade of the high-end device
(which had been planned for a while already); for the arm-specific bug,
a workaround is already in place.
All in all, a pretty good experience.
I know, preaching to the choir and all that. But this can't be said often enough (and perhaps the odd non-Debian person stumbles upon this...): Here's another example of how amazingly fast free tech support works: The newest Linux kernel (Debian package version: 2.6.32-1) wouldn't boot on my 
QNAP has announced a new device earlier this month, the QNAP TS-219P. The
specs are very similar to the TS-219 (1.2 GHz Kirkwood CPU, 512 MB RAM and
16 MB flash) but the device is smaller and has some other advantages.
What I like about the new TS-219P:
Spring has arrived in Europe and I'm looking forward to spending more
time outdoors. While I was pondering some plans, I thought it would be
nice to have a GPS. I've never used a GPS before but it seems it will
allow me to combine outdoors activities such as walking and hiking with
geek things. In particular, I'm interested in tracking where I'm going
(what route, what distance, what speed, etc), geotagging photos and
possibly contributing to OpenStreetMap. Since last week, I have a
Qstarz BT-Q1000X (Travel Recorder X), a GPS logger and receiver, and
I've been playing around with it a bit. This device uses the new MTK II
chip, which gives good accuracy and long battery time.
I've created a new gps category in which I'll share my
experience using a GPS in general and specifically the Qstarz BT-Q1000X.
I've also created a 
What seems like eons ago, I ordered one of those