Ohio Linuxfest 2008

Morning Keynote

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier of Novell, specifically of its OpenSuSE division, delivered the morning keynote. His topic was bootstrapping a community around an open source project. He was speaking from primarily a company project point of view, but his advice extends to freelance open source developers' projects, as well.

One of his main points was that Open Source as a movement will succeed only if companies and communities collaborate successfully. A company which simply opens the source to its software allows others to see it, but that company hasn't truely gone open source until there is a community of users of and contributors to that project. I believe Brockmeier called it "source open" versus "open source."

When it comes to open source governance, some projects get it right—he cited Firefox and Xorg as examples, IIRC—and some get it wrong—XFree86 and arguably KDE. It's important to figure out who from the project will speak on behalf of the project and if the rules of the project will be fiat or grown from discussion and/or necessity. It's also important to listen to managers, shareholders, and the community—and determine which has the loudest voice and most important demands. The project is a balancing act between community needs and business needs.

Brockmeier cited a few challenges which projects face. Small projects lack the resources of large ones. Large projects lack the flexibility of small ones. He also says that it's harder for a company to embrace open source if the company "bought into it" or the like. The biggest challenge, though, is finding a balance.

At Novell in the OpenSuSE division, Brockmeier was brought in to pull together the OpenSuSE community and unify it to further the distribution. He says he acts as an ombudsman: community to company relations. He helped create a governance structure, something which he felt the project sorely needed.