Safe as Milk

OSBC: Opening my mind

March 27, 2009 12:54 am Dave Neary freesoftware

Like Dries, I had the impression that OSBC was something of a parallel world to the type of conferences I usually attend. There were a lot of people from small VC funded companies created around niche enterprise markets (with all due respect to ERPs, electronic document/content management and business intelligence vendors), and the core assumptions that people work under aren’t the same as I’m used to.

For example, it was taken for granted that selling enterprise software implied owning all copyright, and thus getting JCAs signed for contributors outside your company. Also, the way people count the size of their community seems to be different for these company-driven projects – for some, the number of people who create accounts on a forge is their developer community, for others it’s the number of plug-in or extension developers. This isn’t deceitful, but when I think of the core GNOME developer community, I tend to think in terms of people who have access to Subversion, or people who write code for core GNOME components. If we counted the number of people working on GNOME-related projects, or GTK+ applications, then that number gets orders of magnitude bigger.

Why do companies do this? If you say “I have 10 guys working for me, and they write 95% of the code for our core product”, that doesn’t sound quite so impressive. The concern that you’re tring to allay by casting the net as wide as possible is”what will happen to your product  if you go out of business?” In enterprise sales, the viability of your company is under scrutiny during risk analysis, and being able to say that you have a community of 9,000 people building your product goes right to that point. One person I spoke to this week said “open source is the ultimate escrow”.

The reality, however, is that for many of these projects, the company cutting funding for the project or going out of business is very bad indeed for the life of the project. Whether it be Mozilla being thrown a lifebelt by AOL, Novell cutting investment in Hula, or Wengo withdrawing from OpenWengo, the result has been that the project stays alive, perhaps (like Bongo and QuteCom) under a different name, but for several months or years, development slows down as an independent developer community grows to fill the void left by the disappearance of the core development team.

I’ve been trying to think of examples of successful community projects which have grown from the ashes of dead companies. A couple that come to mind are Abiword and Nautilus. Are there others that people can think of which went on to success? How about projects that went the other way? Code that went closed and was sold off by liquidators, or projects that have not had a release since the company went under? I’m interested in identifying patterns in the companies involved.

Update: Bassam from Blender pointed out in the comments that Blender and NaN is an example of a company that went out of business, the company founder started a non-profit, got the code released under the GPL (which it hadn’t been before) and built a successful user and developer community around the project post-liquidation. The personal investment of Ton Roosendaal through that difficult process was really the key point that made the transition so successful – he successfully reconciled business and community interests, and create a sense of community ownership of the project, through the selling of company assets to “the community” via a fundraising drive.