My nearly 11 minute keynote at OSCON 2013 this year, felt long enough when I gave it, but in terms of what I have to say about the future of open source, it wasn’t even close.
Here I expand on the lessons I’ve learned from other people working in open source, new technologies emerging in open source that haven’t come of age yet, my passion for open source not being a Zero Sum game, and bringing open source to other parts of society and industry.
Lessons I’ve learned
I’ve been fortunate in having access to a lot of smart people and I believe Joy’s Law (“No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.”) holds true universally. I explained in my keynote is that I have stopped trying to be the expert in open source and have strived instead to be a student. That’s when I started to really learn about what makes open source work, and I felt strongly that those lessons needed to be shared. These are just a few of the many lessons I have learned.
Most importantly, user-led development (versus vendor-led development) is a critical part of open source success. The best open source developers are who are scratching their own itch (e.g. Linus Torvalds with Linux). I believe the real power of open source is in the democratization of the development informed by real world use cases. While most of the coding in an open source community is usually done by a relatively small number of people, the collective intelligence of a large group of individuals adding their personal experience and feedback in the form of small patches, testing, and feature/bug requests, is what makes open source software so powerful.