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On Sunday at 17:17 (GMT) March 7th my wife gave birth to a beautiful and healthy baby girl, Saskia Frances Gardler at 7lb 10.5 oz. Mum and baby are doing very well and are now home with a proud Dad.

I’d like to publicly acknowledge the superb  care that my wife and I received during this pregnancy. We only truly appreciate the National Health Service when we really need it, and Heidi and I have  needed it on far too many occasions over the last few years. The care we have received has been exceptional when compared to what I have seen in other countries.

I should also mention Oxford University Computing Services. I could not have hoped for a more understanding employer, it was clear from the first day that as long as I worked hard when I was able OUCS would respond by giving me as much space and time as I needed to support my family during this difficult period. I’m truly grateful to my boss Lou Burnard and to my exceptional team here at OSS Watch.

As for extended family and our friends - we hope they already understand how appreciative we are of their combined efforts in recent years.

Like I said in the intro, sometimes life is horrible, but more often than not life and the people around us are wonderful. We should never forget that in the difficult times.

Combining freedoms and copyleft in the Gnu GPL license (invented by Richard Stallman) was the cornerstone of free software. This is now questioned due to the proliferation of incompatible copyleft licenses.

After counting 1,800 free software licenses used in hundreds of thousands of projects, the Black Duck company patented (Patent US 7,552,093 B2) the technology for controlling the use of open source licensing in a multi-source development process (meaning combined works, elaborated from multiple free components under different licenses).

No need to say that patenting proprietary technology to solve copyleft licenses incompatibility may not be seen by everyone as a major achievement!

Lamenting on license proliferation or blaming new license authors – who all call upon the best reasons of the world, looks useless. It would certainly be reasonable, as recommended by Bruce Perens, to deal with only four permissive and copyleft licenses, but this is wishful thinking. New licenses are presented every week by FLOSS authors and communities, and no benevolent dictator will limit human innovation regarding licensing.

The heart of the problem does not lie in the number of licenses, but in their incompatibility. I do not think that license proliferation is a failure of the FLOSS movement, it is rather the entire contrary: a testimony of the attractiveness of FLOSS models. In reality, license proliferation illustrates the failure of a certain model of strong copyleft, as it was initiated by the GPL in the 80’ and – unfortunately - reproduced by nearly all subsequent copyleft licenses. Once necessary and successful, this model looks not adapted anymore because it was copied and - seeing the Black Duck patent - one may question (like Ernest Park has done) if the way copyleft is applied does not generate today more jails than freedom.

According to my first study for the European Commission, the Gnu GPL v2 was used in 85% of the FLOSS projects in 2001. With a copyleft that was – maliciously – said “viral” by some, meaning that compatibility is always “upstream” (to itself) and never “downstream” (to other licenses), the adoption rate of the GPL should have been universal in 2010, confirming analysts’ assumption that “it is good for the community if people use a single copyleft license [1]”. However, the exact reverse happened: the GPLv2 (reducing) is still used in 50% of projects, the new GPLv3 reaches little more than 5% and other licenses are proliferating.

The fact a dozen of licenses are used by 90% of the FLOSS projects does not help very much, as the implementation of free solutions (which are often combined works) is done through integrating many components. It is enough to find only one incompatible license to compromise the distribution of these solutions.

The current situation is damaging for other reasons: it creates endless discussions on what could be considered as integration in combined works (dynamic or static linking) and it feeds disputes. To preserve their communities from schisms, gurus and acolytes urge followers not to use any other copyleft licenses, whatever their specific merits or advantages could be. It is time to admit that the strategy of keeping a “captive asset” of license users was not successful for avoiding proliferation, and that it is not the most appropriate way to reinforce the freedom, collaboration spirit and consistency within the fragmented FLOSS world.

In Europe, the recent - OSI approved and copyleft - European Union Public License (EUPL) meets some initial successes due to its compliance with Member States’ law and because it has equal value in the 22 languages of the Union. It has been selected by the German Federal Agency for Information Technologies, it is the license of choice in schemes published by the Dutch NOiV (see on the www.OSOR.eu site an English version of this scheme, translated by a member of the Swiss administration), a dedicated EUPL site was created in Italy, etc. In Spain, the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Commerce (where the public agency Red.es is located, in charge of information technology) provides the following in call for tenders (software specifications):

“In case the contractor integrates in the development that is the object of the contract with modules or elements owned by third parties, he must first obtain from the legal owners the licenses and rights necessary to transfer the ownership of the development to , which will submit it, including the elements that are performed under the contract (such as fonts, dll, scripts, etc..) to the public license EUPL. In any case the total and final result of the development and the overall project will be subject to a license EUPL.”

Applying such provisions excludes strong copyleft components from the delivered combined work: all original developments are allowed; all “permissive” components are allowed (BSD, MIT, etc.); all “weak copyleft” components are allowed (i.e. LGPL), but no Gnu GPLv2 (or V3) components (except if the copyright owner is entitled to dual license the component under LGPL-like terms, for the purpose of addressing the contractual specifications).

The EUPL itself has an innovative approach to solve copyleft licenses conflicts: it publishes a downstream compatibility list (to other licenses). It is allowed to integrate EUPL components in a combined work that will be distributed under a compatible license. The concept is not new, as the FSF applied it with the LGPL a long time ago. The LGPL (now LGPLv3) is convenient for software libraries aimed to produce combined or derivative works: if the library is propagated on its own, it must be under the provision of its original license (LGPL), but if the library components are part of a derivative work, this work can be licensed under another license, while the original library remains LGPL. The EUPL compatibility is exactly the same, but its copyleft effect is stronger than in the LGPL (because compatibility is restricted to a limited and published list of other copyleft F/OSS licenses). Therefore it is not a weak but – say, a “tolerant copyleft”.

Such flexibility removes incompatibility barriers and restores developers’ freedom, while keeping it in the limits of the desired copyleft effect.

While the EUPL solution may be considered as a conceptual progress, its tangible impact will stay very limited as long other copyleft licenses will not give some reciprocity: the quantity of available EUPL-ed material is quite small today, compared to the mass of components that are already available under the GPL terms. Extending the list of EUPL compatible licenses (i.e. by adding the still missing GPLv3) will not change the issue resulting from the Spanish specifications, where the government requires the facility to distribute the received combined work under the single license of its choice (the EUPL in this case).

Solving problems related to the proliferation of copyleft licenses requires setting up interoperability provisions between these main licenses. It will create, and focus attention, on a kind of “circle of trust” where the original copyleft licensing condition of a software will never be changed, but where – just to take an example – a GPL component could be part of a combined work that the recipient (let’s say the French or the Spanish government) could distribute as a whole under the provision of the copyleft license of its choice (i.e. CeCILL or the EUPL) provide these licenses are allowed in the compatibility list.

The Gnu GPLv3 includes (in its section 13) the exact provision corresponding to the above need, but it is directed to the AGPLv3 only. The intellectual effort to extend this provision in direction of a small list of interoperable licenses seems easy to deliver. The reciprocal condition must be added: in the example above, the combined work could be also (as the need may be) distributed under the provisions of the GPLv3.

This could be a way out to the deadlock where we are, due to the proliferation of incompatible licenses.

Looking for alternative? Pay a Black Duck patent license!

Patrice-Emmanuel Schmitz – www.OSOR.eu

[1] R.T. Nimmer, Legal issues in Open Source and Free Software distribution, The Law of Computer technology, Ch. 11 (1997, 2005 Supp.) (“Two different copyleft licenses are usually “incompatible”, which means it is illegal to merge the code using one license with the code using the other license; therefore it is good for the community if people use a single copyleft license (GPL)”).

Several coding challenges where made and our very own Sander won 2 of them with MuCoMaCo an interesting Google map mash-up of MLA library data. OSS Watch have provided continuing support services to the Apache Wookie (Incubating) project from the University of Bolton. Recently Sander recently organised a Wookie Training day at OSS Watch. This was led by Scott Wilson, Wookie project lead, and Ross, OSS Watch manager. Scott was with us at Dev8D, so it was no surprise that Sander’s winning entry was a Wookie served W3C widget. This enables it to be readily deployed in a range of contexts with little effort.

The other winning entry that OSS Watch had close connections with was Wookie BaLTI. BaLTI is a sample Moodle course by Mark Johnson and Dan Hagon and features the newly developed Twirlymol and CollabMCE widgets. These 2 widgets use the widget loading and collaboration facilities of Wookie to provide a shared 3D interactive view of a molecule model and shared WYSIWYG editing. Several threads came together to make this happen. Those familiar with OSS Watch and open development will not be surprised at how open collaboration has made this possible.

Since we spotted Mark’s announcement of his first small contribution to Moodle and subsequently invited him to present it at an OSS Watch workshop, he has gone from strength to strength. At the Dev8D awards dinner Mark deservedly one ‘Best newcomer’. An award that provided him with a small Lego car kit, which we ‘knocked up’ during the meal, and a rather handmade certificate. The point is that Mark’s enthusiasm for learning about and contributing to open development has been noticed and is sending ripples through the HE and FE communities. Mark attended the previously mentioned OSS Watch Wookie training day, which stood him in good stead for working on the challenge with Dan. Since the Dev8D fun, Mark has pledged on the Wookie lists to reimplement his editing widget without the current LGPL licensed code dependency and to contribute it to the project. Further evidence of Mark’s personal development and it’s far reaching affects comes from his recent blog post. He also supplied us with this comment.

My manager appreciates the opportunities that open development provide to us as a department and an institution, both internally and externally. By letting me go to events like Dev8D even though the things I did there don’t relate directly to my current job, she gave me the opportunity to develop new skills which will allow me to provide new facilities to the staff and students in our institution. We’ve just started an ILT working group with our teaching staff, so hopefully I’ll be able to apply some of my new skills and knowledge to the ideas that come from that.

Mark’s collaborator, Dan, was the first person I met at Dev8D, and as with Mark you can’t help but be affected by his friendly enthusiasm. When I discovered that he had created an interesting Google Wave widget I steered him towards Scott and Mark and watched the magic happen. Scott explain how trivial it was to port the widget to Wookie, and once they’d decided on the LTI challenge Scott added BasicLTI interfaces to Wookie in order to support the challenge work. These are now part of the Wookie project code. More great collaboration followed and someone gave them an Amazon cloud server to install Moodle on. I observed them working together, discussing ideas, fixing bugs and working on their ‘judgement’ presentation. I tried to muscle in on the action with another widget idea but got rather distracted and bogged down in practicalities. Still I do have some new ideas to add to Wookie at some point.

I also attended their pitch to the judges as moral support and I’m glad I did. Chuck Severance of IMS and Sakia and Steve Vickers where in the judging team. A soon as the pitch was over, Chuck and Steve rushed off to add the widget to Sakai, Blackboard and WebCT. Chuck made the point that by using Wookie and LTI it is now possible to have something running in all these platforms, and in a matter of minutes. He then distributed screen shots around various lists.

Dev8D saw many other collaborative ventures seeded or strengthened. New skills were learnt by motivated developers and new contacts made. For example I enjoyed watching Chuck and Tobias Schiebeck work on a tricky Sakai bug. Finally I’d like to mention GNOME who were running an overlapping event in London. After a bit of prodding for collaboration, Willie Walker and Brian Cameron came over and presented on accessibility and GNOME work. Both were very interested in the accessibility possibilities of “Mr gadget” Ben O’Sheen’s demonstration of software to talk to wiimotes. A representative from Dev8D also went over the to GNOME usability hackfest and I expect we will see fruitful cross pollination developing from this mutual interest. Not least is the opportunity for HE/FE developers to learn from a large, established and successful open source project.

Google showed the way, really, with the MapReduce paper in 2004. They published their programming model for processing large amounts of data in parallel and although publishing it, they did not neglect to apply for a patent as well, which was recently granted. Hadoop, which originates from a project at Yahoo!, also implements the MapReduce pattern, but is completely open source being a project of the Apache Software Foundation. And now recently Apache Cassandra has joined the mix. Cassandra originates from Facebook, but has become open source in July 2008. It recently promoted from the Apache Incubator and is now an official top-level Apache project.
Work has been initiated to facilitate integration between Cassandra and Hadoop, which simplified means the Hadoop database HBase is replaced with Cassandra. There has been discussion of this on the list and a feature has recently been implemented. So there’s Yahoo! working on Hadoop and Facebook working on Cassandra, and recently also Twitter has announced that it is working towards using Cassandra for their backend. Also worth mentioning is the open source implementation of Amazon’s Dynamo database which is named Voldemort. This project is used and actively developed by LinkedIn and is therefore another example of how you can benefit from the work this large company is investing by engaging with this project.

To me, this all shows that there will be large investments in NoSQL databases from major companies in the coming years, and it will all be in open source software. This means that there is a lot of opportunity for anybody who has to deal with big data to profit from this investment. All you have to is try out the software and engage with these projects. Researchers also have to cope with more and more data, so I think they have good reason to follow these developments closely and step in to benefit.

Those with little or no experience of implementing computer systems assume these savings come from the fact the free and open source software does not carry a license fee. However, this is not usually the case.

Anyone who has rolled out an software solution, even in a small organisation, will tell you that there are hidden costs. These include training, support,  customisation and maintenance.

In 2005 BECTA published “A study of the spectrum of use and related ICT infrastructure costs” which concluded that training and support costs accounted for 60% of total cost for any software solution. The report also found that open source software reduced these costs by 40-50%.

Further to reducing training and support costs, open source can reduce the cost of customisation for specific environments.

It is extremely rare for a back-office software solution to be a perfect fit for any specific organisation straight out of the box. Consequently, the software needs to be customised to suit specific needs. In a closed source environment there is a single provider, or a limited set of approved providers, who can make these modifications. However, in an open source environment anyone with the appropriate skills can make these modifications, including internal staff.

As a result of this competition, market forces can often result in a lower cost for a tailored product. Just how much can be saved here depends on the customisations you need to make.

Finally, the open source culture of code sharing results in lower development costs for the software in the first instance. That is, once one user has commissioned a specific feature or configuration option the results of that work is available to all. As a result, the more a product is used and developed within any given domain, the more widely the development costs are shared. In addition to a reduction of costs open development can significantly increase the rate of innovation as it brings together great minds to collaborate on shared solutions.

Where there is no pre-existing solution to match ones needs the open developent model can be an extremely cost effective way of reducing cost. This process is examined in more detail in our document “Meritocrats, cluebats and the open development method: an interview with Justin Erenkrantz.”

The documents on our web site undergo a rigorous quality assurance process that ensure they are technically correct and well scribed. The result in this case is an comprehensive introduction to a topic that can be over looked by projects, or may cause confusion and uncertainty.

I have on several occasions heard lead developers say that if they make their code open source they fear they will loose control and anyone can update their source, leading to chaos. As you read these documents you will see that this clearly should not be the case. The project leaders remain in control, in fact they make the decisions on who the leaders are and how the project is controlled. The governance model describes how this happens.

Having a governance model in place is one of the clear marks of an open source project that practices open development. That is, it marks a project that positively encourages community engagement.

Governance models provides an introduction to the what, why and wherefore of managing an open source project.

A governance model describes the roles that project participants can take on and the process for decision making within the project. In addition, it describes the ground rules for participation in the project and the processes for communicating and sharing within the project team and community. It is the governance model that prevents an open source project from descending into chaos. This document explains why a governance model is necessary, considers some of the challenges associated with adopting a governance model in open source projects, and looks at the key areas such a model needs to cover. It also describes how to encapsulate your governance model in a governance document.

Meritocratic governance model provides a detailed insight into this common model that is lead by an elected leadership team or ‘board’. A template is provided for use by projects interested in applying this model.

The meritocratic governance model is a commonly found model in which participants gain influence over a project through the recognition of their contributions. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is perhaps the most famous example of a large-scale meritocratic community. The foundation operates with an almost completely ‘flat’ structure, which means that anyone willing to contribute can engage with their projects at any level.

Benevolent dictator governance model describes another popular model where one person leads the project and has a final say in decisions. Again a template is provided for projects wanting to use this model.

A benevolent dictatorship is a project controlled by a single leader. Perhaps the most commonly cited example of the benevolent dictator model is the Linux Kernel project, which is run under the direct decision making leadership of Linus Torvalds. Being a benevolent dictator is not an easy job. It requires diplomacy and community building skills, in-depth technical knowledge of all aspects of the project, and exceptional levels of commitment and dedication. However, as the Linux Kernel project illustrates, it can be very effective.

With any project, good leadership or management are vital, and these documents will help you install the basics with little overhead. If your project already has a governance model in place then these documents could help you refine it, perhaps by making it explicit. If you don’t yet have one, then these document will help you decide what model best suits your style, and quickly get it into operation.

And you can do it all without any sign of pointy hair.

Scott Wilson, the Wookie guru from Bolton University, where it all started, started the day off with a presentation (pdf) of what widgets and Wookie are all about. Widgets are basically small mini applications that are designed to work in a small view area. Many platforms have created their own format for it, but the W3C is working on a set of specifications for it with a consortium of partners from both traditional computing and mobile platforms, which will lead to a true cross-platform standard which will hopefully lead to widespread adoption. A minimal W3C widget consists of nothing more than a config file and an HTML file, zipped up as an archive with file extension .wgt. The config file contains basic configuration such as the name, description and preferred dimensions of the widgets. The widget can furthermore include as much HTML, CSS, images and JavaScript files as one would like.

Apache Wookie (Incubating) is an application that provides a W3C-compliant widget server. You can use Wookie to deploy widgets and you can serve W3C widgets from the Wookie server in third party applications. Plugins have already been written for Moodle, LAMS, Sakai and Google Wave. Wookie also has a REST API that can be used to get, or create widgets.

After Scott’s intro it was time to get dirty. Ross handed out CDs containing the latest sourcecode of Wookie (which can be downloaded by anybody from Subversion) and prerequisites like a JDK and Apache Ant. His presentation (pdf) was about ‘how to build your first widget’. I was surprised to see that there were 10 people with Mac-books in the room, amongst 4 Windows machines and one Linux netbook. Apple surely knows how to impress the developer these days! After some initial troubles with environment settings etc. most people got up-and-running fairly quickly and were ready to build their first widget. Wookie provides handy Ant tasks for building and deploying widgets, which means that generating a hello-world skeleton widget is as easy as typing ant seed-widget and answering some questions about the name, description and dimensions of your widget. After you have started up the Wookie server using ant run you can deploy the widget using ant deploy-widget. That was it, quite easily. I must say, having moved away from Ant and using Maven2 for the last few years, it’s nice to be remembered of the powerful features Ant has to offer. Especially since Wookie uses Ant in combination with Apache Ivy, the dependency management alternative for Maven2. (To be precise, you can also use Ivy with Maven2 repositories). Ross also demonstrated how you can make use of OpenStreetMap JavaScript APIs to embed cool navigational features in your widget quite easily. You can check out his presentation (pdf) or directly check out the source code of the tutorial including the example JavaScript.

In his second presentation (pdf) Scott focussed on some design principles behind the widget specification and gave a walk-through of how you can design a more advanced widget by making use of features of the W3C widget object API and integrate with the Google Wave Gadgets API. No Wave server is needed to get this working, as Wookie can handle everything for you. Scott demonstrated a Task widget with collaboration features, that can be used by different users concurrently using State and Participants.

After the break it was high time for everybody to create their own widget and some interesting ideas had come up. One of us decided it would be much cooler to hack directly in the server code instead of building widgets and he submitted a patch to Wookie to allow hot deployment of a widget to ease the development/deployment cycle. That’s very cool, thanks Matthew!

The rest of us built some widgets for a wide variety of purposes. One of the nice things about the widgets was that we could easily merge them all together on one Wookie instance and show all widgets there. These were some of the widgets that resulted from this 1.5 hour hack-fest:

• Video player embedded in a widget with fallback to other formats depending on the user agent
• Display a list of links using output from one of the Yahoo pipes
• Display the last.fm playlist of a user and show what that user is currently listening to
• Show a canvas drawing where multiple people can collaborate by working on the same drawing using HTML5
• Cool kids’ game where the user can name his pet dinosaur
• Currency converter that (eventually) would use an external currency conversion provider

It was fun to see how easily you can create functional widgets. If you make use of external JavaScript APIs or data feeds it is also quite simple to create a useful (or not so useful…) widget. This was a nice conclusion of the day and seeing all the widgets we had created we thought we had deserved our beer and headed off to the pub. Thanks to Scott and Ross for making this a successful Wookie training day!

Until this fallout from the recent takeover of Sun by Oracle, Willie was employed by Sun to work full-time on GNOME accessibility. The removal of Willie’s salary has removed a critical source of funding for open accessibility and the community is reeling as a result.

However despite the understandable concerns for the future of both Willie personally and GNOME accessibility, this is also a opportunity for both. People like Willie are highly sought after by employers who value leadership skills coupled with excellent technical experience. A couple of people described Willie as the Linus of open accessibility, a simile that has some merit. We can hope his next employer (or funder) will allow him to further develop his passion for accessibility, building on his impressive legacy to date.

For the GNOME and open accessibility communities, the impact of this seemingly crass business decision also causes us to focus hard. It can be a catalyst for improving the sustainability of this small but effective community as Willie himself indicates. I’d like to explore the subject a little in this post.

In general people get involved in open source for selfish reasons. These may be personal needs, corporate motivations or academic interests. The power of open development comes from working together to develop and maintain a common resource that benefits all players. The famous phrase is ’scratching an itch’. When it comes to open accessibility, however, there is an extra dimension. While many members of the community are users of accessibility, others are not and are involved for more complex reasons like social concern, if not quite altruism. This leads to members being in a position of “scratching another person’s itch”. There are elements of accessibility being a basic human right and these colour the community relationships and explain some of the strong outraged reactions to Willie’s layoff. As an aside it’s worth recalling Sun’s significant contribution to accessibility, something that was obviously not core business for them.

The fact that community members are in it for largely selfish reasons means they are likely to leave for equally selfish reasons. There should be no surprise at that. The key is to develop a broadly diverse community that can sustain any individual member’s exit. This is the opportunity I see we now have. I hope that Willie will continue to work full-time but I also hope we will work hard to attract more members who will also bring resource with them. Many of the reactions have vocalised the need to find funding but I feel we should focus on building the community first and the funding will follow. We also need to build community as, to be frank, there is a huge amount of work to be done, as can be seen on the GNOME 3.0 accessibility roadmap.

That might sound rather glib and the question is how can we move forward and encourage? Building community is difficult and not a science but there are many good examples to learn from. I’m fortunate to work for OSS Watch who’s key message is open innovation through community. Ross Gardler our service manager is also Vice President of Community Development at The Apache Software Foundation. The Foundation are also highly experienced in community development. Their informal moto is ‘Community over code’ and most of their activity is community building. For example the Apache Incubator helps projects develop their community and graduation requires at least 3 independent comitters to have joined. So there is a wealth of experience available to tap into and I’d like to see how the open accessibility community can use this to become more sustainable.

On to some practicalities. We are already seeing signs of the community dusting itself down and moving on. Eitan posted yesterday on further plans for the GNOME accessibility ‘hackfest’ at the CSUN accessibility conference. CSUN is THE accessibility conference and this year GNOME joins Mozilla in having a booth. This is the perfect opportunity to introduce GNOME’s work to the #CSUN10 visitors and encourage users and companies to engage. If you are going to CSUN be sure to find the booth and meet the team. The hackfest is the place for other developers to come along and learn what the code looks like and what needs doing. If your are a GNOME, KDE, Linux or Linux Mobile developer you should look us up to find out how to make your program accessible or how to work on accessibility programs.

This year the winners of Projects:Possibility’s SS12 open accessibility coding competition have been invited to attend CSUN. They will look around and present their winning projects. Accordingly computer science students from CSUN, UCLA and UCS will be able to learn about GNOME accessibility and find how they can engage in the action. At a minimum they will take their knowledge of GNOME to their future employers.

In a couple of weeks the GNOME Usability hackfest is in London and overlaps with the Dev8D developers days event. Cross fertilisation is planned and given that accessibility may be viewed to be a part of usability there is another opportunity to explore how to support GNOME accessibility.

OSS Watch have developed a tool that will be useful for exploring the sustainability options for GNOME accessibility. It’s part of our forthcoming Software Sustainability Maturity Model and provides a Q & A on the areas that need to be be covered in order to reach open sustainability. I encourage community members to try it on their project or the community as a whole. It will help focus on the the gaps and provide a common language for discussion of the solution. The form provides detailed explanations and the results are presented as percentages. If you are not sure just leave it as “don’t know”. Results are likely to be cleared at some point, so if you want to keep them drop us a line and we will provide a copy.

So in summary the news of Willie’s layoff is a source of considerable concern for him personally as well as the GNOME accessibility and the wider communities. It is also an opportunity to move on and develop new strengths through open development. The community has previously survived funding loss (IBM) and a key player leaving (Bill Haneman). As Willie says in his email - spread the word far and wide. The time is good as there is not only growing interest in open source in general but also a widening awareness of the benefits of open accessibility. If you are a member of the community then you can start thinking about how to reach out. If you are not yet a member then do introduce yourself at one of the events or on the lists or IRC.

we have a release of Matterhorn now, and people start to use our system and they need support. I’m sure that many of us are willing to help these adopters, but in which way should they communicate with us?

This prompted a discussion I have seen many times, and so I was prompted to post my response here.

In my opinion there are two main reasons why someone would support a user:

1. they are selling services
2. they want to improve the quality of the product

Financial transactions should be divorced from community activity and thus, from a community perspective, we are left with those wanting to improve the project (I’ll return to paid support later though). People providing support in the community have two main objectives:

1. increase the number of users
2. understand the problems users are facing in order to improve the product, to attract more users

Increasing the number of users will ultimately increase the number of contributors (bug reports, feature requests, documentation, user support etc.) and eventually developers (code improvements). Thus attracting users is a key part of creating a successful open source project.

However, not all users will become contributors, and not all contributors will become developers. In fact, the numbers of people progressing along this scale of contribution is very small. Nevertheless, just one contributor is a reduction in the centralised cost of development and thus a step towards sustainability for the project.

For some people the idea of free support for a growing number of users appears to lack scalability. They ask “if we are attracting users at a faster rate than contributors/developers how does the project continue to provide support? Surely there is  a danger of too many resources being devoted to support and not enough on development.”

These are common concerns in a growing project. However, these assumptions ignore the fact that some people are willing to pay for support. The ideal solution is to provide a user support mailing list along with supporting documentation. There is a need to encourage everyone to assist with these community support channels. This channel should become the place where the not only users get support, but also where those providing paid for support seek support themselves. However, support provided from the project community is provided on a voluntary basis and therefore no guarantees of service are provided. The message is clear, if you want guarantees of service then you need to pay for it.

Of course “paying for it” may not mean in cash. For example, if an organisation is known to provided paid for support but they also provide resources for project management, documentation, code or some other contribution they are earning “credits” to get support themselves.

Over time, the number of “first level user support requests”grows. However, the number of people able to answer these questions is also growing, lets not forget that some of those users are still around and are now indebted to the support community. Furthermore, since a healthy project encourages people to contribute early by documenting their experience in FAQs and getting started documentation there is an increasing amount of support documentation for newcomers.

This self-help culture enables core community members to focus on bug reports and feature requests rather than first level support requests.For those users who need a fast turnaround on support requests, they will have to pay. They may contract a third party or they may use local resources to set up a local support infrastructure.

If these paid support providers are smart they will reduce their own costs by interfacing with the wider support community via the project support lists. They will both consume and produce commons support materials in the project. They will also recognise that visibility in the community support channels is a form of marketing for their paid-for services. And this is where the virtuous circle finally closes.