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Cornelius Willis on developing community

I spent some time with Cornelius Willis today talking about bootstrapping developer communities. Cornelius used to be at SourceLabs and is now CMO at Pluggd, a very cool video search company. (He demo'd the system for me and I was blown away. Searching for keywords in a video - based on speech-to-text technology with some secret sauce thrown in - is genius.)

Cornelius said something that I found brilliant. In terms of developing community, Cornelius suggested that

You have the make the community visible to itself.

In other words, a developer is much more likely to stay with a community if she actually feels like she's not alone. Things like Digg let you see votes, as well as the process for tallying them. You know you're not alone in Digg. You know that your vote counts, and that you're visible in voting.… Read more

A day of Bungee (Moving RIA development to the web)

I'm an advisor to Bungee Labs and am spending the day with the company (along with other advisors from Sun, Amazon, etc.). I'm not a developer myself, and so focus more on the community-building activities of the company, but they mentioned an incident at the eBay Developers Conference that I found fascinating.

eBay developed a new eBay Shopping Web Services WSDL. They stopped by the Bungee Labs booth and asked what the company could do with it.

By dragging and dropping components and objects, [Bungee] had a simple application running in minutes. The application had an input field to specify a search query. When you clicked the search button, the query results (item title, gallery URL, View Item URL, etc.) were displayed on the form.

Start to finish, this all took less than 20 minutes. Not bad for working with a new API. And, as [Bungee] pointed out, we never left the web browser!… Read more

Open source arms dealers

Look around at the rising tide of open source companies, and you'll find some things in common:

Jira for bug and issue tracking; Confluence, SocialText, or some other wiki technology for online documentation; Jive Forums or other forum software of some stripe; Demand generation software ( Loopfuse, Eloqua, or other) Hyperic for network functionality (a la Red Hat Network).

There is other software that open source companies have in common, but these are some of the major commonalities. Most people don't realize just how much money there is in arming the next century of software. Atlassian, for example, is … Read more

The Open Source CEO: Dries Buytaert, Drupal (Part 10)

In this tenth installment of the Open Source CEO Series, I shifted gears again to talk with someone that has chosen not to carry the CEO title, despite ample opportunity to claim it. (I know a range of VCs who would love to invest in Drupal.) Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, is Linus-like in his ability to build an amazing community without undue concern for commercializing his success. I think he's one of the most interesting people in open source, given what he's accomplished and what he continues to forego in terms of cash and publicity.

I caught up with Dries on his way to the O'Reilly Foo Camp. Here's a guy who has created one of the world's best open source web content management systems...yet I bet no one will recognize him at the airport...or even at FOO.

Name, position, and company of executive Dries Buytaert, Founder and Project Lead, Drupal. Dries blogs here.… Read more

The Open Source CEO: Ranga Rangachari, Groundwork (Part 9)

In this ninth installment of the Open Source CEO Series, I spoke with Ranga Rangachari, CEO of Groundwork, an open source IT management company.

IT Groundwork has been around for several years; in fact, it was one of the first open source startups I discovered when organizing the first Open Source Business Conference back in 2003/04. The company was doing well at the time, but I believe it was Ranga's influence (starting in 2005) that has ratcheted up the company's profile and performance.

Name, position, and company of executive Ranga Rangachari, CEO, Groundwork.… Read more

The Open Source CEO: Satish Dharmaraj, Zimbra (Part 8)

In this eighth installment of the Open Source CEO Series, I spoke with Satish Dharmaraj, CEO of Zimbra, the industry's leading open source email/collaboration software.

Satish is the rare CEO who whose intelligence dwarfs his ego. He has managed to build one of the most interesting and media-hyped startups in the software world, with a highly competent team (which includes Scott Dietzen, former CTO of BEA), and yet he remains humble and seems happy to let others on his team shine. You'd think that more CEOs share these qualities, but in my experience Satish is a rare find.

Name, position, and company of executive Satish Dharmaraj, CEO, Zimbra.… Read more

The OSI calls "Foul!" on pseudo-open source

It was just a matter of time. But eventually, it was bound to happen. Some in the industry have been playing fast and loose with the term "open source," and yesterday Michael Tiemann, president of the OSI, cried 'Foul!' on his blog. As Michael writes:

Starting around 2006, the term open source came under attack from two new and unanticipated directions: the first was from vendors who claimed that they have every bit as much right to define the term as does the OSI, and the second was from vendors who claimed that their license was actually faithful to the Open Source Definition (OSD), and that the OSI board was merely being obtuse (or worse) in not recognizing that fact. (At least one vendor has pursued both lines of attack.) This was certainly not the first attack we ever had to repel, but it is the first time we have had to confront agents who fly our flag as their actions serve to corrupt our movement. The time has come to bring the matter into the open, and to let the democratic light of the open source community illuminate for all of us the proper answer.… Read more

The Open Source CEO: Kelly Herrell, Vyatta (Part 7)

In this seventh installment of the Open Source CEO Series, I talked with Kelly Herrell, CEO of Vyatta, the open source network software company (router and firewall).

I first bumped into Kelly back in 1998 when my employer (Mitsui Comtek, the high-tech subsidiary of Mitsui & Co.) invested in Cobalt Microsystems (Linux microserver company acquired by Sun for $2.1 billion). I bumped into him again years later when he was running operations and strategy for Monta Vista, an embedded Linux pioneer.

Kelly is one of those people that you respect even when he's kicking your tail (as was the case at Monta Vista - I was at rival Lineo). Once known for being "the world's best-dressed Linux backer" [Correction: I inadvertently linked to an article on Peder Ulander, who dresses much better than Kelly, though I do have to say the first time I met Kelly he was wearing a green shirt and matching green shoes :-) ], Kelly's reputation is now right where it should be: a tier-one open source executive.… Read more

The Open Source CEO: Boris Kraft, Magnolia (Part 6)

In this sixth installment of the Open Source CEO Series, I decided to change gears a bit, and talk with Boris Kraft, CIO of Magnolia, a leading open source content management company. Boris differs from previous CEOs profiled in this series because, first of all, he's not a CEO. But I decided to make the exception here because he's the strategic leader and community manager for a vibrant open source project with executive responsibility for Magnolia, the company, as well.

Name, position, and company of executive Boris Kraft, CIO and Community Lead, Magnolia, Simple Enterprise Content Management.

Year company was founded and year you joined it The Magnolia project started in March 2003, with the first public release on November 15th, 2003 (Magnolia 1.0). How the company was founded to capitalize on growing interest around the project is a long story.… Read more