Category Archives: Open Source

Books C++ Development OGRE Open Source Windows

Review: OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook

August 19, 2012 – 11:20 am

It’s always gratifying, and a little weird, when I see books being written about OGRE – it just serves to illustrate (if any more evidence was needed) how far the project has come since I created that first ‘vertex coloured triangle’ rendering test on my home computer 12 years ago. I’ve been retired from the project for a while now, but I still get asked my opinion about things sometimes, and Packt were nice enough to send me a copy of this new book by Ilya Grinblat and Alex Peterson, OGRE 3D 1.7 Application Development Cookbook, to see what I thought.

Firstly, don’t worry about the version number in the title, it’s really just a minimum version. All the information in this book is equally relevant to the recently released OGRE 1.8.

This book focusses very much on practical exercises, which I really like as a learning style. I often end up learning new languages and APIs, and I always prefer to bootstrap using books that teach by example in the first instance, and this one does that very well. The steps are well laid out with regular full-colour screenshots (at least, in the electronic version I have).

Also, the book tackles a number of areas that haven’t been covered before in other books. While it still deals with all the basics too, it covers new areas like creating GUI tools with OGRE viewports and how you’d deal with selection, orbit cameras, and linking visual properties to controls. It also covers creating plugins, procedural mesh content, custom resources, and more advanced elements of animation that I haven’t really seen discussed elsewhere. So the book covers a lot of ground – there’s a limit to how much detail they can cover in each area, but it’s easily enough to expose you to the core techniques so you can expand from that on your own (indeed the “There’s more” sections throughout the book hint at where you might want to explore next).

So on the whole I thought this was a very useful book. There’s one important caveat that I’d add:  it’s very, very Windows-focussed. If you’re developing with OGRE for any other platform (Mac, Linux, iOS, Android etc) then the step-by-step nature of the instructions won’t be as useful to you, and several parts of the book won’t be any use at all without heavy conversion on the part of the reader. The first few chapters aren’t relevant at all to non-Windows users, and there’s a few others where the practical example is dependent on a Windows-specific technology such as the Microsoft Speech SDK or the AVI toolkit. All the GUI-related parts of the book use MFC, which again is entirely Windows-specific; and personally, I’ve had a strong dislike for MFC pretty much since I first encountered it 20 years ago. I think Qt or wxWidgets would have been far better choices for these sections.

So, if you’re a Windows developer and are happy with using MFC (even if just to learn), I can recommend this book wholeheartedly as both a practical, hands-on OGRE tutorial and an exploration of some interesting lesser-visited areas. If you’re on another platform or like me don’t like MFC, I still think there’s plenty of useful information here, but you’ll have to be prepared to put some extra work in to convert some of it, and/or be content to skip some of the chapters that won’t apply to you, so bear that in mind when making your decision.

Thanks to Packt for giving me a copy of this book to review, and congrats to the authors on the release.

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Business Open Source Productivity

Oh no, not a ‘Best of’ collection?

May 2, 2012 – 12:21 pm

Well, yes – and my apologies if you’ve already seen these.  In celebration of the new blog and before I’ve polished any new entries for it – I often write & refine my posts over several sessions, I find the content is better that way – I thought I’d flag up three posts from this blog that I’m particularly satisfied with, and that I think resonated well with people.

  1. Work 2.0 – the interruptible programmer
  2. How to make decisions
  3. My evolving view of open source licenses

Hope you enjoy!

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Cocoa Development Objective C Open Source OS X

SSSelectableToolbar

June 20, 2011 – 1:32 pm

A common requirement in any Cocoa application is a preference pane style window where each toolbar item switches to a different view in the main window, resizing as necessary. I’ve used BWToolkit to do this in the past, which provides BWSelectableToolbar. However, there are a few issues with using BWToolkit:

  1. If you want to deploy on the Mac App Store, You have to customise it to remove all uses of private methods, since those are banned on the App Store.
  2. It sometimes crashes Interface Builder – usually not fatally but it can get awkward
  3. Sometimes it gets the window height slightly too tall when switching panes – I’ve patched it to try to cope with this but it still happens sometimes
  4. It relies on using IB plugins. XCode 4 does not support IB plugins anymore – although you can still build the code, you can’t edit the nibs anymore

I’ve just been coping with 1, 2 & 3 so far, but 4 was the killer which made me come up with my own alternative: SSSelectableToolbar.

With SSSelectableToolbar, you can still do the preference pane setup entirely within Interface Builder, but it doesn’t require any plugins. There are a couple of extra steps required because of this, but they’re not onerous and still better than setting it all up in code.

The license is permissive MIT, usage is in the README, and there’s an example demo to show how it works. I hope it’s useful to someone else too.

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Health OGRE Open Source Personal

The spinal analysis, and what it means for OGRE

April 27, 2010 – 11:21 am

For 18 months I’ve been told by a succession of doctors and physios that I didn’t have anything structurally wrong with my spine and that my bouts of back pain were simply ‘standard non-specific back pain’ – ie muscle problems that I should just take NSAIDs for and exercise more. I’d been a bit skeptical because the problems were occasionally quite extreme and seemed to be always centred on one particular location (the joint just at the bottom of my ribcage), but after getting many opinions and one set of x-rays I went along with it.

Things have been quite good recently, up to mid-February when I had a bit of a relapse for a few weeks after doing a little too much. I raised it with my doctor again, explained that I’d been doing all the exercise and going to the gym as recommended, and yet it still flared up at what I considered to be fairly minor provocation. He scheduled me in for another set of x-rays which I expected to not come back with anything conclusive since the last set didn’t (and you can’t get into the MRI scan here unless you go through this step again first, allegedly). They took more pictures this time but I didn’t expect much given all the opinions so far.

Imagine my surprise therefore that when I got the results today, they actually had a concrete explanation for me. Apparently in my lower thoracic (ie exactly where I’d been pointing all these months) I have some disc degeneration and calcification going on, which is what is causing the stiffness and pain. This is something that happens with age anyway, but given my relative(!) youth (36) they thought it looked like it might be a result of either a trauma such as a sports injury – I can’t think of anything – or sometimes they see it in people who were child gymnasts – again not something I can attest to! Basically, something has happened to make my spine degenerate in that area faster than it should have done for my age. Too many hours spent stressed out at a desk may have been a contributing factor in that, although he thought it would have to be a lot of hours and probably combined with other factors.

So anyway, the ‘good’ news is that I actually have a reason now, an explanation for why I’m so susceptible to strains and stress on my back these days. In a way it’s nice to have something to point at. The bad news is that this isn’t fixable, it can merely be managed via careful exercise and lifestyle changes – many of which I’ve made already but I probably need to go even further. The prognosis is that I should be able to live pain-free so long as I manage it carefully over the long term to stop it degenerating further.

Following this analysis, I’ve been prompted to make a decision which I’ve been reluctantly considering for a while anyway – I’m retiring as OGRE Project Lead. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my 10 years leading OGRE from unknown personal project to where we are today, but leading an open source project requires an enormous amount of dedication, passion, and above all an awful lot of time spent at a keyboard, most often in addition to a ‘regular job’ with which to pay the bills, and I feel I just can’t give that to the level that’s required any more. It will be with no small amount of sadness that I finally take off the leader’s hat – which by now is quite battered and worn in. ;)

I still intend to be around and involved in the project – I’ll be contributing some code, giving advice when it’s wanted, and overseeing the establishment of an OGRE Foundation to handle the donations and funding side, but the days of me living and breathing OGRE, vetting every change, and being the person with whom the buck stops when there’s a bug, will be over. I’ll basically be contributing what and when I can, but shrugging off the responsibility and expectation that is inevitably associated with being the lead developer.

We have a great team and community around OGRE and I’m sure the project will be fine with me taking a more back-seat role – time for younger and less physically challenged developers to step into the limelight :)

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Development Internet OGRE Open Source

Mailing lists as community channels – ugh

February 17, 2010 – 6:09 pm

gnu_mailmanI’m not blogging as often these days; as you know I don’t traditionally ‘do’ short blog posts – in my book if something is worth blogging about, it’s worth making sure it holds together as an argument, and as a piece of writing generally – and a combined lack of time of anything I’m motivated (or permitted) to talk about has left the site a little  bereft of content. Luckily my OGRE Twitter is stocked with more frequent and less lovingly crafted status updates on what I’m doing there.

So, on to the title of the post. The Internet has been around for a while now, and has evolved rapidly, particularly in the last decade. And yet, particularly in academic and some open source developer circles, there is an attachment to a particularly creaky piece of technology that I can honestly say I do not share - the venerable mailing list.

Now, to clarify the context, I’m referring to the use of mailing lists for multilateral communication for an entire community, including newcomers, as opposed to a simple 1-way notification list (like we use for commit notifications for example). For N-way communication among a small group of core developers, all of whom will want to read every post, I can see the utility and convenience of a mailing list. But as a community communication channel, where people just want to drop in and drop out, I find it a staggeringly inefficient, awkward and archaic approach. I say this primarily as an occasional community member of various projects that use mailing lists, and therefore someone who has a specific interest in a mere subset of the discussions that go on – I have no time or desire to read every single thread, and indeed if I tried to do this for every project I have an interest in, I’d never get anything done. It’s hard enough to keep up with my own open source community!

The simple fact is that mailing lists have an all-or-nothing mindset that is woefully outdated for community interaction on the scale that the Internet has now grown to.  Subscribing means you get bombarded with every single discussion, either individually or in digests, which pretend to be useful but in fact aren’t, because while they cut down on the number of emails you get, it makes replying to specific posts a pain. If you want to read every single mail in the list, I’m sure they work fine – but most people outside the core group do not want to do this. Most members of the community just want to keep a closer eye on a few select threads of discussion that either affect or interest them, and to be able to search and browse through the rest easily – and the mailing list is a woefully inadequate, blunt instrument for this kind of task.

Sure, you can choose not to subscribe, and go through the archives, searching or browsing them. But you can do that with forums too, and there at least you have the advantage of categorised areas of interest, being able to follow certain people, and to watch certain threads. Mailing list archives have a single filter: date, and also lag by a number of hours dependent on the individual setup, so if you’re not subscribed, you get a lesser service.  Another technique is to subscribe completely but tell your email client to archive or filter things for you, so you can dip into your local replica at leisure. Horribly, horribly inefficient, but it does work.

Mailing lists worked in the 90′s when there were small groups of people who wanted to read everything being discussed, and when email was the primary form of communication between people. We’ve moved on. Forum systems and other flexible hosted systems are far superior in their ability to let you watch particular discussions (or all new posts) that you’re interested in and get told when there’s an update. Anyone can search them easily (internally or via Google) and there’s no archive lag. Maybe some people are worried about forum databases being lost, compared to inherently replicated mailing lists, but anyone worth their salt has a server backup strategy.  Honestly, any project that uses mailing lists as their only community discussion channel instantly puts me off getting involved in that community, because I know that as an occasional participant interested in only certain discussions, the experience is going to totally suck.

And, if you insist on loving your mailing lists approach so much, for goodness sake move to Google Groups. They’re still pretty basic, but at least there, those of us who have moved into the browser world can use an interface we find useful and productive, rather than being forced to use 20-30 year old technology designed to replicate posts around a university science department.

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Business Open Source

“Commercial Source” licensing

December 14, 2009 – 6:33 pm

Making a living from open source is hard. Correction – making a living from writing open source software is hard – it’s incredibly easy to make a living from someone else’s open source software of course, which is why that’s what most people do :) At one time the popular opinion was that pure-play open source companies could make a living from support services, which works to a degree but I know from both my own experience and from that of others that it doesn’t work that well. Again, the best chances of it working are if you’re providing support services for software that someone else writes, because you’re only able to monetise the service, not the development. This actually discourages people from investing in development, and instead merely in deployment and ancilliary services which isn’t actually a good thing for core product development.

The best cases of companies funding open source are where they’re using it to deliver some other product or service which is directly monetised, therefore the open source development comes under their general R&D budget. Google, IBM and others fall firmly under this category, and you can bet that the largest open source software projects are funded this way – Apache, Eclipse, Firefox all pay their core developers like this. But, it requires a fairly significant level of scale to be able to do that, hence why it’s usually the giant corporations that do it rather than smaller companies.

The next favourite option is dual-licensing; the general set-up if you come at this with a commercial hat on, is that you pick a license that a lot of commercial entities will have a problem with extending from (ie GPL), then you sell them an alternative license; the idea being that you get the adoption via the open source license and make money from the commercial license. But, it can be controversial, as most recently discussed by Greg Stein in the Oracle / MySQL case.  The argument is that if your commercial license is just a proprietary license, and can be revoked and otherwise monkeyed with by the issuing company (or perhaps more importantly, its acquirers), you have actually been lured into a honey trap – the lure being that open source comes with certain protections, but that if you rely on the availability of the commercial license you actually have none of those and might as well have bought from a proprietary software vendor.

So, what to do? If you’re a small development company, open sourcing your product will definitely bring more people in, but if you’re not in the hosting / cloud business and don’t want to rely on services to earn your keep (who can blame you), what can you do to earn your keep except abandon open source for your main products (maybe splitting your time between proprietary and open source), or dual-license and face accusations that you’re fibbing about the true nature of your product for your commercial users?

Well, I’ve been wondering whether the problem is that dual-licensing typically falls back on traditional licensing concepts, ie that your commercial license looks very much like a normal proprietary license, which has all the problems of ‘what if my vendor changes the license conditions’ etc – when in fact it really needs to be more like a permissive open source license, with a payment condition. One of the great powers of open source is that it is ‘detached’ from the producer and compeltely predictable and immutable – once the software is out there, it can’t be taken away from the receiver and is always ‘whole’ in terms of the source code so no-one is tied in. There are also cast-iron source & binary redistribution clauses that are known up-front, and are again immutable, which mean everyone knows where they stand, forever. Why can’t the commercial side of a dual-license continue to do this, while at the same time generating a revennue stream for the company?

Maybe I’m being naive. But what about this sort of dual-license set-up for a library or toolset:

  • Default is GPL (and obviously free)
  • Commercial alternative license available, giving very permissive rights, but with these important rules:
    • The license is irrevocable once issued
    • The right to redistribute unlimited copies of derivative binary works is included with Apache-style conditions
    • The right to redistribute unlimited copies of derivative source to anyone under the GPL (for free) is included
    • The right to redistribute unlimited copies of derivative source under the permissive commercial license conditions is also included, provided the same original license fee is paid per receiver. Critically, the price and conditions surrounding redistribution may not be altered unilaterally by the licensor at any time after the license is issued (so once you’ve bought it once, the conditions and price for non-GPL redistribution are set in stone and cannot be altered unless both parties agree – say if the price is reduced later)
    • All software reverts to the Apache license if the company folds without selling the rights to someone else

This would mean that those choosing to opt for the commercial license would have the same kind of cast-iron guarantee an open source user has that once software is out in the wild and being used under some conditions, that the originator cannot possibly change that, ie take it away or change their right to modify and redistribute under conditions they agreed to at the start. To me, this seems to give the same kind of certainty over not being screwed over in the future as open source does, thus blunting the accusations of proprietary lock-in by the back door, but while generating some revenue for the developer too. It is, in effect, the same as a permissive open source license with the one addition that redistribution of the source to a new party requires either payment to the originator, or reverting to the GPL.

Now, of course there is still potential uncertainty around new versions of the software, but this is no different from open source, where your only guarantee is over what is published right now, not what might happen in future versions.

Does anyone know companies that use this model? My experience is that commercial dual licenses tend to be as restrictive as proprietary licenses, which then can justifiably lead to accusations that the open source license has been used as a shill to get people into a lock-in scenario. Is there really a ‘third way’ or am I missing the point?

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Development Open Source

Open source is most important to producers rather than consumers

December 12, 2009 – 12:04 pm

Gartner haven’t exactly been the sharpest tools in the box when it comes to predicting open source trends over the last few years, vastly underestimating it until about 2008, by which time it didn’t exactly take a professional analyst to tell you that it was popular. Still, now they’ve woken up to its potential, occasionally they post something useful. In particular, I liked a recent blog post about how open source is “trending towards customer obscurity” – that is to say that while open source is incredibly important to producers of software, the vast majority of consumers don’t really care how their software is made any more than they care how their car was made.

I support this view, and it’s one I’ve subscribed to for a while (although the somewhat condescending tone of the article is typical Gartner, the point is valid). My own open source software is aimed squarely at developers, where I think it adds value; since the users of my software are themselves making significant development investment in products using it, open source has significant advantages – the openness and participation-friendly nature of the development, the fact that the software can never be taken away from them either by company policy or acquisition, the fact that absolutely nothing is hidden behind any curtains so there aren’t any nasty surprises. When you’re investing your own time building on top of a foundation, there really is no substitute for being able to see all the working parts, should you want or need to.

Developers can be quite a broad church too – enterprises for example often have a need to modify and adapt software and that’s why open source has been very popular there too, even if they’re not actually making products of their own for publication.

But there’s also a vast group of people who are more traditional consumers (personally and in companies) – and they have no reason to care about open source if they’re never going to modify the software. There is a group of people who are philosophically dedicated to using free software (more so than open source) even if they never modify it themselves, but they’re a minority in the grand scheme of things. Most people that use open source do so because they feel it gives them what they need as users. Even personally, I use Linux on my servers not because I’m dedicated to using open source over the alternatives wherever I can (although I probably do have more bias in that direction than the average), but because it does exactly what I want in a server – it’s reliable, unobtrusive, cheap, has low hardware requirements and plenty of good software. Conversely, I don’t use Linux on the desktop much because personally I don’t feel it operates better than the commercial alternatives in that environment. I decide on a case-by-case basis what works best for me, and so do all but the most fanatical of users.

Now, of course open source regularly helps developers make better products (by using mature, reusable and adaptable components), which in the end can result in more users using software made from open source even if they don’t realise it. But the important thing to remember is that open source itself isn’t a marketing bullet point except to developers and the enthusiast minority. Like any gathering of like-minded people who mostly talk to each other, we open source developers / advocates can often forget that our enthusiasms aren’t necessarily shared by the rest of the populace. We have to remember that the end result is everything – and while open source definitely has a positive knock-on effect on product quality, it’s often a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. It’s obvious really, but worth keeping in mind.

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Business Open Source

Some CIOs don’t know what the hell they’re talking about

December 2, 2009 – 10:42 am

I picked this story up via Matt Asay and it pretty much summed up the frustrations I’ve had in the last 10 years when talking to certain people about open source – particularly when I was involved in business software. Peter Gyorgy, CIO of GE made this comment in a recent panel discussion:

“I think open source is great for own internal playground type of things but if it’s running vital mission critical applications – networks running on open source for example – then that is a huge, huge risk to the organisation,”

This would be incredibly funny if it wasn’t so damn indicative of so many CIOs, managers and other closed-minded, overly conservative IT people who have long since given up on trying to stay reliably informed and just believe what their vendors tell them. It’s especially amusing given that GE’s healthcare division runs its mission critical software on Linux, which their CIO seems oblivious of. And I would expect the New York Stock Exchange would be considered ‘mission critical’, and it runs on an open source platform (and interestingly the LSE is switching to Linux too) – so clearly not everyone thinks like this.

The one place where he does have a potential point, albeit skewed beyond all recognition is when he says:

“We are not here to be an IT shop, we are here to be the partner of a business and we shouldn’t put businesses operations into risk by running very low cost solutions,”

That’s a very valid point. However, it’s got nothing whatsoever to do with the choice between open source and anything else! This is such a common misconception. Open source has matured – if you need enterprise-level open source there are companies that are quite happy to take your money to remove the hassle and worry of system stability. They’re really no different from the Microsofts and Oracles of this world, except that the software they’re running your system for you on is open source rather than closed. That gives you an additional bit of leverage because if they suck, or if they try to pull a fast one on prices, you can actually get that enterprise management from someone else without having to change your software too. Try doing that when you switch from Oracle to Microsoft or vice versa for services.

You also have the advantage of not having to wait for a central vendor to hear your pleas for feature A or B, or a bugfix that might be low priority for most people but is absolutely critical for you. Instead of hacking workarounds and seething in the wings while you wait for your vendor to get around to addressing something they think isn’t a priority because it’s not affecting that many people, you can pay someone to fix it for you and submit it upstream, where it will undoubtedly get accepted far quicker than it would have got fixed if only a central vendor was looking after it.

You don’t have to be running an IT shop – although if you do, you have the option of trading your own time for monetary savings and greater agility – your support options are just different. Sure, they can be slightly more complicated if you let them be – particularly if you’re looking to save money or drive things in an optimal direction for your company such as tailoring the software – but if you want to have a simple 1-vendor setup using only standard versions you can do that with open source too. Delegating all support to a third party will cost you more but the option is there. It’s all about choice, flexibility, and empowerment – all things a CIO should welcome, not be afraid of (otherwise he/she’s probably in the wrong job).

I think too many IT managers / CIOs have a mental block which prevents them from being really committed to optimising their IT delivery, in terms of both spend, alignment with the business and agility for the future, because they’re locked inside a box of their own making.

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Development OGRE Open Source

hgsubversion – dropping old history during conversion (mod)

November 24, 2009 – 8:24 pm

mercurialI’ve already posted about my experiences with Git and Mercurial, the end result of which was a vastly increased respect for Git but a basically confirmed preference for Mercurial, based on ease of use, platform consistency and resilience.

Mercurial’s conversion tools are really quite good – the core tools worked fine but I was impressed by hgsubversion‘s speed and that it seemed to just work, in both initial conversion and pulling subsequent updates. It was missing a couple of features that I wanted though – firstly the ability to reflect merge points between branches during the conversion, and secondly to be able to ‘squash’ ancient history down to a simple snapshot to save space.

At OGRE, we’d carried forward all our history from CVS to Subversion and as such have almost 8 years of history, including a couple of file reorganisations. Mercurial’s storage efficiency falls down compared to Git when files are moved around, because a file stored in more than one place in the tree over the history of the project is physically stored multiple times too, whilst Git stores the content only once with pointers from the various locations / history points. Most of this overhead could be removed just by eliminating old history we didn’t need anymore – history that does no harm in Subversion since only the server holds it, but does cause unwanted overheads in a DVCS since every user gets the entire repository. Removal of history is something that Mercurial shuns – rightly so in the case of public repositories but in these rare cases it would be nice if there was a tool for removing old history; again Git allows this but it has to be used with care. In the absence of that, doing it at conversion seemed the best way.

I asked about these things in the hgsubversion community, but the tradition of open source is that if you really want something urgently, you know where the code is :) Mercurial is really nice when it comes to hacking because it’s all Python; so there’s a nice unified API in one place that you can refer to – that’s one of the reasons I like it over Git which is far more fragmented in technology terms. I’m not a Python guru by any means, but I managed to implement both these features – I did the “mergemap” support a little while ago and added the “skipto” option today – it’s called that because “skipto” was already referred to in the hgsubversion code but it had no implementation.

The result is that the OGRE Mercurial repository with only the last ~3 years of history (back to when the v1.4 branch was created) is now only 74MB, rather than the 206MB of the original, complete conversion (in comparison Git was 116MB for the whole thing). By dropping the history I’ve removed most of the instances of reorganisation which is where most of the space has gone. I  hope eventually that Mercurial adds a utility to deal with stripping ancient history (right now, you can only strip branches) but this solves my primary conversion issue. Since this new repo can be kept in sync in a very lightweight fashion with the existing Subversion repo, I’ll be periodically updating it and doing more tests to reassure myself that the content really is ok.

If you’d like to get my custom version of hgsubversion with these features, it’s here: http://bitbucket.org/sinbad/hgsubversion/. I make no promises that it’s error-free, use at your own risk. It currently assumes that you’re using the standard Subversion layout, are converting from the root of that and have the ‘svn’ command on your path.

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Business Open Source Tech

It’s all about the middle ground

November 24, 2009 – 11:41 am

I always find Matt Asay’s blog an interesting read – even if I don’t always agree with him, his posts on open source are always thought provoking. Today he was talking about how Wikipedia’s contribution rate is falling and how that has parallels in open source; that the community is no replacement for a centralised, focussed team.

He’s right on the core point – at the heart of every successful open source project there’s always a core team (or individual), and in the really influential ones, that team is usually funded – Mozilla is famously bankrolled almost entirely by Google, the Apache foundation has many, many sponsors including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Eclipse has IBM, and so on. Many of the big projects that don’t have more general sponsorship still have a core team funded by a dual-license or other premium software model: MySQL, RedHat/JBoss, Qt etc. Such guidance & direction at the core is crucial – at OGRE we have a core team too, except that we’re not directly funded by anyone in terms of developer time (we have several generous sponsors who cover the majority of our hosting needs); we guide it because we want to, and because we use OGRE ourselves too. My company is probably the closest thing to a core development sponsor, in that I’ll allocate “work time” to doing OGRE development that could otherwise be spent making commercial products or doing consultancy, but it’s by necessity small beer compared to the likes of Mozilla and Apache.

But I do think he underplays the changes that have taken place in the software development world. He asserts that because most headline software development is still focussed at big influential companies, we’ve mostly just rearranged the chairs a bit at the same banquet. I don’t agree with that at all – by nature it still makes most sense to concentrate much of the development in a small team for quality, consistency and organisational purposes, but the point is that where precisely this centre is determined primarily by merit, not by the boundaries of a company’s org chart. While the core team is doing a good job, and accepting reasonable patches and such, people are happy for the show to be run there. The community is still definitely involved in the development, and certainly adds considerably to the end result. Yes, proportionately the central team does more, but crucially, should anything go badly wrong – such as the core going in a direction a lot of people don’t like, or the product being sidelined, if there’s enough of a community a fork will emerge, with another core team to lead it. That’s a critical safety valve that keeps companies more “honest” than they had to be in the past, and is a vital insurance policy for anyone investing their own resources in a piece of software. Matt claims the ‘Command and Control’ setup of software vendors is still in place; I think his view is clouded by the fact that he’s solely focussed on enterprise software, and enterprise customers move at such a glacial pace that any change is largely imperceptible – to the extent that ‘community’ maybe does look a lot like the ‘customers / partners’ relationship of old. But that would be a bad call, completely ignoring the difference in the level of control that is ceded to a community versus the customers of old – sure, many enterprise customers may not wish to leverage that control, and would take a long time to move if someone else chose to do so, but that option is still always there. And not everyone in the world is an enterprise customer – the enterprise usually follows the grass roots eventually.

In practice, it’s really all about balance, the middle ground. Yes, we still need focii of development just to make sure things get done in a reasonable fashion – no-one likes chaos in their software. Yes, it makes most to have that focus funded, in a traditional company model, if that piece of software gets beyond a certain size / popularity. But that doesn’t for a second undermine the value of community participation; in fact the two are deeply interdependent – one without the other is just not sustainable in a sizeable project.

So, people certainly shouldn’t be deluded into thinking that random crowds of people on the internet will create great software without some organisation (the infinite monkeys creating Shakespeare fallacy), but they also shouldn’t think that community is disposable and that we’re in the same situation we were before but with a different label. Nothing could be further from the truth.

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