[OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Lurkers

Landon Blake lblake at ksninc.com
Tue Aug 25 13:07:35 EDT 2009


Jody,

 

Thank you for all of your comments. They were insightful. 

 

I should point out that I don't get really bothered by the private
contacts, which aren't that frequent, and was more interested in finding
a way to get lurkers more involved. It seems this is more challenging
than I first realized.

 

Landon

Office Phone Number: (209) 946-0268

Cell Phone Number: (209) 992-0658

 

 

________________________________

From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Jody Garnett
Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2009 6:31 AM
To: OSGeo Discussions
Subject: Re: [OSGeo-Discuss] Open Source Lurkers

 

Evening Landon:

 

As you have gathered from the responses thus far that lurkers are
actually the larger part of the user community - and do not really
represent an opportunity to acquire new developers for your project.

 

The point is that they are part of the user community; and are probably
not in a position or motivation to become part of the development
community.

 

Some tips for involving them:

- make sure project wiki; issue tracker etc is very open to input

 

What to do when they email you directly:

- This is a hard one; they are asking for free support; and are too shy
or unable to go to the public email list

- I answer (or point out docs) and remind them that LISAsoft offers
commercial support; and that free support from fellow users is available
on the email lists

- If they have an issue I may turn their issue into an item on the bug
tracker; and invite them to add comments with more details. I find it
easier to show how to make a good bug report  (but other developers have
helpful links about how to make a bug report).

 

What happens next is kind of up to the reaction...

 

If they launch into the issue tracker; or user list; and start
interacting with community members:

- if it is a documentation or api question I will write a wiki page and
ask them to review.

- If it is a bug - It is time to start talking about patches; creating
them; attaching them to the bug tracker; and so on.

- The first time I will facilitate this process; often using IRC or
something

- Chances are if they have started down this road they are going to have
a successful open source experience and after a few months (6 months to
a year) it is time to start talking to them about commit access and
taking a larger role. 

 

If they persist in contacting me directly:

- If they are contacting me by my work email address - I usually feel
comfortable phoning and/or asking talking to their boss about commercial
support options at this stage :-)

- If they persist in contacting me directly; I will start to CC my
responses to the public email list (I change my note about commercial
support to a link to all the organizations offering commercial support
as it is not great to advertise).  There is the risk of of course deeply
offending someone and/or getting them in trouble - this is balanced by
the risk of being taken advantage of. 

- Chances are If they start down this road I will hook them up with one
of the companies supporting GeoTools (on a good day it will be a company
I work for)

 

What is fascinating to me is how well some of the distributed version
control technologies are geared towards allowing groups to have a shadow
copy of a project. Maybe I should reword that as an "internal" version
of a project; it is actually  a really good practice; offering a balance
between "Sticking behind on a stable version" vs the risk of "using the
latest". It really provides a programming team to control the software
they are getting from the community at a different pace then the release
cycle; it is also really good in that these teams can live and breath
patches - and can hire you to fix problems.

 

What is more difficult is explaining about how LGPL means that the work
they do internally needs to come out :-) But that is a topic for another
day ...

 

Cheers,

Jody

 

On 22/08/2009, at 4:55 AM, Landon Blake wrote:





I would like to get some comments on a phenomenon I have discovered
among the OpenJUMP community. I know for sure of one (1) company that
maintains a separate fork of OpenJUMP, but which monitors our mailing
list and likely grabs patches form our source code repository. They
never participate in the forums or make known their use of OpenJUMP in
any other public manner.

 

I think there is at least one other company that does this.

 

I only learn of these companies when I am contacted by private e-mail to
work for them on OpenJUMP development, usually by some headhunter. I
actually did a little work for one of these companies (which was not a
great experience, but that is another story) and I was surprised at how
important OpenJUMP was to their operation. They even distributed it to
their customers.

 

I couldn't for the life of me figure out why this company wouldn't take
a more active role in supporting the OpenJUMP community. I'm not
necessarily talking about money here, but about writing documentation,
contributing their own patches, or answering questions on the mailing
lists. Our community is very informal and open, and an organization
could likely have a large influence on the direction the program took
with an investment of some resources.

 

Is OpenJUMP the only community with these open source lurkers? How many
of these companies do you think there are? (I'm not talking about one
guy who downloads an open source app and uses it. I'm talking about
actual companies with more than one employee.)

 

Why don't they get more involved? Are they embarrassed? Do they not want
their competition to find out about the open source program they are
benefiting from? Are they violating the terms of the license and don't
want to get busted? Do they not understand that their involvement is a
key part of the program's survival?

 

This has become an important question for me recently as the active
development of OpenJUMP has slowed. We don't have any organizations
actively participating in development. (Well, maybe one or two, but they
have been quiet lately.) I'm the only one working on serious
improvements or changes, and not just bug fixes. I would really like to
reach out to these lurkers to get them more involved. Ultimately, the
survival of the project may depend on it.

 

What do you think? Send an e-mail to the project list with an invitation
to contact me privately about getting more involved? Are these lurkers
worth the time?

 

Landon

 

 

Warning:
Information provided via electronic media is not guaranteed against
defects including translation and transmission errors. If the reader is
not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any
dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly
prohibited. If you have received this information in error, please
notify the sender immediately.

_______________________________________________
Discuss mailing list
Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/discuss/attachments/20090825/ca97e279/attachment-0001.html


More information about the Discuss mailing list