Sourcekibitzer Interview

posted 06:51PM Jul 18, 2007 with tags ego interview lars sourcekibitzer trieloff by Lars Trieloff

My Interview with Sourcekibitzer is online: Open Source does not need a guru, because it is not a religion. I am talking about Mindquarry, Open Source in general and Gurus.

Open Source Economics and why visibility is good for you

posted 12:12PM Jul 03, 2007 with tags economics ohloh opensource sourcekibitzer by Lars Trieloff

Jitendra Gupta wrote an interesting article at Read/Write Web: Open Source Economics Driving Web 2.0 Innovation which explains some Open Source Business models and how they play nicely with Web 2.0. Much of this article is based on the research of Dirk Riehle, a scientist at SAP Labs whom I met some time ago. Jitendra sums up the reasons why contributing to open source makes sense to developers as follows:
It used to be the case that contributors did not get paid for their contributions and had to work on their own time, but things are changing. With the popularity of open source projects, more companies are paying contributors to support the community, or are even contributing proprietary modules to the community. This provides direct incentives to contributors to work with the community.
Open source participation is a great way to establish credibility if you are a programmer…Have you seen ads like these: "With your resume, please include some php and javascript code snippets or refer us to an open source project you've worked on."
Most good open source developers have an opportunity to become a public voice for the project. This extended role for engineers not only means an ego boost, but also translates to higher salaries etc.
As a developer of proprietary software, most of your know how is bound to this proprietary product and when you leave the company, this know how is in most cases of no use to your new employer. With every piece of knowledge you gather in proprietary development, you become more valuable to your current employer. As a developer that contributes to an open source project, e.g. because your employer uses this open source software you become an expert in this particular open source software and gather knowledge that is valuable to your current employer, and to potential future employers. This allows you to bargain stronger for your next raise.

You can increase your visibility to even further by using services like SourceKibitzer: This service donwloads source code from public open source subversion repositories, analyzes it for various metrics that are all related to your actual contribution and allows you to host a developer biography to tell even more about your skills. A similar service is ohloh.net, which in contrast to Java-centric Sourcekibitzer covers all programming languages popular in OSS development, but offers less visibility to developer profiles and has no Java-specific metrics.