Feeding the Ecosystem vs. Feeding the Trolls
One of the lists that I read, and occasionally post to, is asterisk-dev. I usually don’t have time to follow the discussion closely, but this morning Russell posted (and blogged) about the possibility of the Asterisk project getting involved with Google’s Summer of Code this year. Russell solicited input from the list on projects that people would be interested to see worked on and, more importantly, willing to mentor. The OpenNMS project (which my employer sponsors and helps maintain) was a mentoring organization in the 2008 GSoC, so I sat up and paid attention.
The first response was a suggestion for a third-party license server. Now on its own, that proposal is at least somewhat reasonable — developers of commercially-licensed applications that run on GPL-licensed Asterisk would of course like to be freed from the drudgery of bringing their own license enforcement code, and a trickle-down benefit to the Asterisk project could arguably result. However, the person making this suggestion felt the need to go from “somewhat reasonable” to “colossal troll” by adding the following zinger:
Seems no one at digium is capable of implementing it so why not give some 18 year old kid the chance.
Russell identified the project suggestion as not necessarily fitting the spirit of GSoC, and the comment as completely unnecessary. The troll, of course, didn’t take the hint.
First, let me defend those insulted here. I know personally and/or have worked with professionally probably a dozen or more Digium employees, and every one of them is a first-class developer, engineer, product manager, or people manager. I have also been a GSoC mentor, and can say without reservation that as a rule, any student who has made the cut to participate in the Summer of Code is not “some 18 year old kid” but an adult (in more than just the legal sense) worthy of the same respect as any other colleague.
Second, for those who don’t instinctively understand why a third-party license server, even an open-source one, is outside the spirit of GSoC, let me refer to the 2009 GSoC FAQ on the first of several goals the program aims to accomplish:
Get more open source code created and released for the benefit of all;
As discussed above, such a project could arguably have an indirect benefit to the Asterisk project by easing one unpleasant development task and therefore making Asterisk more attractive to a wider range of developers. The problem is that the only developers who are currently saddled with that unpleasantness are, by definition, ones who are creating non-open-source products. I’ll stop short of saying that any commercial licensing libraries exist that are “perfectly good”, but there are ones out there that get the job done if you’re willing to pay to include them in your products. Apparently this troll thinks that Digium owes him a free alternative to those products, and that if Digium won’t spend its own money to write one for him, perhaps they could dupe Google into paying a $5,000 USD stipend to some hapless code-monkey kid who’ll write it for them.
That’s not what GSoC is about, and it’s not what open source software generally is about, and it’s not what Digium is about. Here’s the kind of company Digium is.
Around ten years ago, a friend of mine was running a business called Linux Support Services. Realizing that he needed a phone system, he looked around and saw that the options on the market that could meet his needs were impossibly expensive for the budget of his company, which he had bootstrapped in his parents’ garage before moving its offices to a bigger city. Since he was a telephony geek and a Linux geek and a brilliant guy who didn’t know to be afraid of the task, he sat down and started writing a software PBX that ran on Linux. When it got to the point of being usable, he decided to release it under an open-source license for anybody to download and use for free. Over the course of a couple years, the PBX software grew in maturity and popularity to the point that the company was doing more business around the PBX software than in the area of Linux support. The company found further success building and selling hardware for interfacing the PBX software with the traditional telephone network, and since the company had either sole or joint copyright on all the PBX code it was also able to sell a thoroughly quality-assured, supported version of the PBX software under a commercial license to customers with a need for such a thing. Never has the commercial product had any features that were missing from the open-source product, and the direction the company has chosen for the project has always been heavily informed by the wishes of the open-source development community outside the company. Since the company had moved fully into the digital telephony space, it changed its name. To Digium.
One of the things I’ve always admired about Digium as a company is that it’s very good, on balance, about recognizing that the community of open-source developers outside the company is an essential part of what makes Asterisk great. It’s an attribute that we try our best to share as we make money in support of our stewardship of the OpenNMS project. Digium also recognizes that the ecosystem of third-party commercial products and services that has grown up around Asterisk must be nourished if the platform is to remain innovative and relevant. The community and the ecosystem usually coexist peacefully even if they don’t entirely agree on all points, or entirely understand each other at all times. This morning’s incident, I think, serves as an extreme example of what can happen when somebody from the ecosystem with an inflated sense of his own entitlement metaphorically drives a truck through the front window of the room where the community is busy working. It’s a testament to the mettle of the Asterisk community that the troll got only a single, cool-headed reply to his overture, and then nothing but silence when he tried to stir things up again. The thread about GSoC, meanwhile, has yielded lots of good discussion.
