The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

Now at Mozilla, she’s in charge of making the famous bottom-up processes run
smoothly. It’s not quite the myth of a self-organizing system; it’s closer to a situation
where people are persuaded rather than forced to collaborate around defined products.
Says Baker: “Mostly we just talk about the large projects, such as Mozilla,
Apache, Linux and MySQL. In these projects, there need to be rules and policies. It
may be different for all the smaller projects that are less visible.”
Indeed, more and more creators and users of open-source software work in corporations;
many of them develop open-source software for corporations. They may volunteer
for the work and the corporations may contribute those individuals’ time,
but they often work for a salary for corporations who have some vested interest in
the results of their work, even though they won’t own it. “That has changed the
dynamic substantially,” says Baker. “Even though we don’t own the software either,
we do need to control the process because so many people are involved and are relying
on us. Corporations won’t use open-source software if we can’t set schedules and
stick to them. We need to work in a manner that companies can understand and rely
on; they have to choose to join.”
What people don’t understand about open source, according to Baker, is that it’s not
necessarily a loose culture of potluck and anything goes. Programmers tend to be
precise people, and their code has to work. The challenge is corralling all the talent
and energy into producing precisely defined pieces that work together smoothly. She
adds, “We have very disciplined processes in lieu of a complex management chain.
These processes help us to maintain the quality of our product and allow many people
to work together smoothly. Most companies have a business reason for getting
involved. They need to learn something specific about the project to understand
whether it fits. But it’s a new experience for them. They understand that the engineering
needs to be done publicly, but they’re not used to discussing marketing and
planning with outsiders. I try to help them get comfortable with that.”
Kim Polese, SpikeSource: Insourcing the plumbing for open source
“It feels like everything I’ve been working on during 20 years in the software industry
has been leading to this point,” says Kim Polese, who joined SpikeSource, the
Kleiner Perkins-funded open source company, as CEO in August 2004. “Code re-use,
modular design, dynamic objects. . .finally can be unleashed because of broadband,
Web standards and open source.”
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