On Idealism and creating your career

I enjoy working with open source software - I guess that comes as no surprise to those of you who know me. There are many reasons why I'm drawn to the open source model, including the following:

• I like making stuff, and have the skills to do so - It's getting easier too. Application developers are realizing that making it easy for their users to extend and customize their products can only be a good thing. KDE 4.0 does this very well - you can write many simple KDE extensions in a language of your choice. Of course there are more ways to extend an application than by programming - but that's hat I'm good at.
• Most of the time, I enjoy the community. Like any community, there are always going to be your garden variety blockheads, who seem to live for the sole purpose of making every one else's lives difficult. The open nature of an open source community makes it harder to deal with these people, but I guess that's the price you pay for freedom. On the other hand, where else can you mingle with thousands of industry experts for free? It's like being at a huge tech conference twenty four hours a day for free!
  
• Open != unprofitable. Many open source projects have gone on to be the basis for a successful business model. Sure, it's harder to make truck loads of cash by treating your customers poorly, but it is possible to grow a successful business by releasing open source software. The list of companies is huge - Trolltech springs to mind - they've just been bought by Nokia for some vast sum of money, so they must be doing something right.
• Finally, I enjoy the fact that there are no boundaries. If you have an idea for a piece of software, you can make it. There are no closed protocols to get in the way, there are no commercial pressures forcing you to take shortcuts; you are free to write your software as you wish. If you feel that writing a product that consumes massive amounts of memory and randomly crashes is a good idea - go ahead. The measure of success will be how many users use your software.
  Another point here is that this openness and strong competition leads to some very careful planning of software features. Take KDE 4 for example. Some very intelligent people have sat down together and thought about the best new features they need to make KDE even better. Don't believe me? See Aaron Seigio's KDE4 release keynote speech; it'll knock your socks off.
  

In some ways, that last point leads to a kind of Darwinian evolution amongst software packages. Good packages survive because they're popular, and thus more developers work on them. Bad packages languish and die. Sometimes packages are forked and sometimes packages are merged. This seething "package soup" has given us a very rich mix of packages to choose from. I can name a dozen web browsers, at least fifteen email clients, and twenty text editors off the top of my head. They're all slightly different, but they're all good software. Some might argue that we're spoiled for choice, but that's another blog post for another day!

Working as a volunteer on an open source project takes skill, commitment and determination. There are very few external motivating factors. If the project you're working on doesn't interest you, chances are you won't complete the work. The reward at the end of the tunnel is the gratitude of your fellow developers and users; not to mention some new skills you can take to your next project.

I've been involved in open source software for the last 10 years in one way or another. In that time I've picked up many skills that I can be proud of. Unfortunately, in my professional life, these skills aren't recognized by my peers - and understandably so. I have no formal qualification in the subject area, they've never seen me apply my skills in a practical manner, there may even be a lack of understanding that it's possible to gain new skills outside professional development or formal qualifications.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I want the open attitudes of the open source world to migrate to the commercial software development world. I want to have an "anything is possible" attitude towards our commercial products. We've already seen time and time again how products that started out as garden-shed projects with this open attitude have merged into multi-billion dollar products. Why can't we replicate that in a real business?

Obviously these Utopian ideals need to be tempered with the reality of running a business, but I refuse to believe that the two trains of thought are mutually exclusive. I encourage any of the readers of this blog to try to develop an "anything is possible" attitude towards product development. If you set your mind to achieve greatness, it'll happen. Why settle for anything less?


I realize that this may sound a little naive - but that's the whole point. Naivety isn't something to be ashamed of, that idealism is what makes us great; our ability to see the world as it should be, and strive to meet that distant goal is (as far as I'm concerned) fundamental to what makes us human.