Ok this article is overdue! Open source is the way to go. I could now give an almost infinitly long list of reasons and examples where and why open source is winning. But instead I want to give you just an experience from my last two weeks. Before I start let me mention this: In my oppinion This does not only go for writing computer software. Open source or being open is a philosophy. it transfers perfectly to music c.f. share your music but do it the right way and to other industries.
Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management from Google only one year ago opened my eys with his open letter to all google product managers and to the world. You can / should and MUST read the letter under the following address
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/from-height-of-this-place.html
So here you go with my little open source experience:
About 2 weeks ago I was in the middle of redesigning metalcon. I already had a database schema ready and was discussing it with friends. Jonas gave me a call he suggested to look for a different database software since my schema was much more like a graph. From my PhD advisor I knew that there are some researchers working on a thing called graph data bases. I opened my first choice search engine and typed in graph data base. After a little bit of reading I got to know the open source Graph data base called neo4j. Apperently Neo4j seemed to be the most sophisticated Graph data base that exists so far. Since we want to use it as our core technology of metalcon being sophisticated is quite an important propertie.
Anyway I downloaded the database and did some first testings of neo4j’s speed. I was amazed. I was also amazed that in comparison to some other graph databases this strong and powerfull tool is available for free. I could not afford to spend money right now so I decided I want to return something to the open source community of neo4j and contribute to the project.But what could it be?
- I had some trouble in setting it up together with google web toolkit and I didn’t find any resources on the web (due to the fact that neo4j isn’t to famous yet and the resources just did’t exist). Usually I wouldn’t care. After getting a piece of software working I would be happy and start using it. But neo4j as a startup is open source. The people who are driving the project have the right scope. So I realized that making a screencast on neo4j with gwt would be my way to contribute to the open source project.
- After i did that the guys from neo4j contacted me and asked me for feedback on their documentation. So I read the documentation again and wrote down every question I had. not to ask them to answer the questions but to show them what is unclear to a reader. Again the guys from neo4j have been very happy.
A screencast and “proofreading” of course is nothing in comparison to programming a whole database management system but it helps others to quicker leran neo4j which mght result in more customers. Especially the guys from neo4j don’t need to do it and can focus on improving their software. So open source wins. They would not have earned a single dollar on me if it had a commercial licence. But they would have had less publicity and at least also one friend less.
Do you see what I mean? Do you see why open source wins in a world where everyone is connected and information can be distributed very quickly?