So I may have just had an epiphany. Not sure. At Mifos, we’re in the midst of really digging deep and thinking hard about what being open source means for us. This covers things like licenses, business models, partnerships, community building, and all that jazz. The tricky bit is that there are lots of models out there, from pure organic developers scratching their itch projects to full-on commercial open source business applications (think SugarCRM). Depending on where you are on the spectrum, you act differently: Sugar’s open source profile is different than Apache’s is different than…
I use ecto for offline blogging - it’s pretty sweet - but I just found a bug that, I suspect, I could just fix right now on the plane if it was open source. (actually, I’m not 100% certain it’s not open source but it is to me right now since I’m on a plane and can’t check).
Here’s the bug (and yes, I should report it when I get back online): I had an entry composed offline, saved, and closed. I reopened it after noticing that I hadn’t thrown a category on it (mild ecto gripe: I want to create a new category while offline), checked the “Travel category”, and closed the window.
Bug: it didn’t pick up the category change, and didn’t flag the entry as unsaved, so it allowed me to close without saving the change. Now that has got to be fairly straightforward to fix (if the app is decently built) but alas, not today.
I can’t quite articulate the epiphany, but there’s something in there related to the ability of users to do stuff in OSS projects - even if it’s just bug reporting - that makes them a deeper part of the development process. Also makes me realize that I would be stoked if my job evolution led to lots of time with customers, lots of time thinking about strategy, lots of time building a killer team and keeping them happy and productive and on mission, and a bunch of time hacking on Mifos directly. I guess I’m in charge, so maybe I can do that.
Stay tuned…
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