Influence in open-source development communities is earned through years of writing and sharing great code. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, influence in the business side of open source is also gained through sharing expertise, and not necessarily from making mountains of cash.
At least, that's the lesson I take away from MindTouch's inaugural survey of 50 open-source business executives. MindTouch, an open-source collaboration company, has spent the last few months surveying executives within the commercial open-source community, asking them to name the most influential people within the commercial open-source ecosystem.
The result is effectively an all-star list of open-source business executives. The top five are as follows:
- Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM
- Matt Asay, vice president of business development, Alfresco (and fellow CNET blogger)
- Mårten Mickos, entrepreneur-in-residence, Benchmark Capital, and former CEO, MySQL
- Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat
- Dries Buytaert, co-founder and CTO, Acquia
The full list is available here.
The common theme running through these top-five vote getters is how open they've been with their peers. Larry Augustin sits on several boards of open-source companies, but he also frequently speaks at industry events and has been involved in open source from its inception.
Matt Asay, my friend and fellow CNET blogger, sits on more than 10 open-source advisory boards, chairs the Open Source Business Conference, hosts an informal get-together every year (called Open Source Goat Rodeo--don't ask why), blogs at an unhealthy rate for CNET on open source, and has actively helped a range of aspiring open-source entrepreneurs understand the mechanics of running an open-source business.
Mårten Mickos made the world safe for the $1 billion open-source acquisition, but he has also traveled the globe speaking at open-source events and is very generous with his time, sharing know-how and best practices with other open-source executives.
Jim Whitehurst, breaking the typical Red Hat mold, has been active in industry events, has hosted a range of dinners and other small-scale, intimate events with open-source executives. He is amazingly accessible, given that he has a fast-growing open-source company to run. It's unfortunate that Whitehurst is the only Red Hat executive to make the list; Red Hat should follow his lead and be more permeable to its peers. Its influence would grow accordingly, just as Whitehurst's has.
Finally, there's Dries Buytaert, who blogs frequently on his project, Drupal, but also regularly attends and speaks at industry events. He has also been active behind the scenes, working with other open-source companies to share information on how to optimize community development.
Open-source code becomes valuable when you give it away. The same holds true for open-source business expertise. There are individuals who have made more money than these with open-source software, but in terms of influence, the more you share, the more influential you become.
What do you think? Who else should be on the list? Who influences you?
One of the biggest misconceptions in software is that open source equals free. The early commercial open-source vendors like MySQL and JBoss were able to build decent businesses on top of a license/support-only business model, but over time we've seen that approach become difficult to grow beyond a certain threshold.
I suspect that in 2009 it will start becoming clearer as to what you pay for and why you should. Redmonk analyst Michael Cote made the prediction that next year "it will be cool to pay for software" and I agree. It's one thing to consume open-source software and quite another to pay for it.
Most open source vendors have tweaked their business models to include some kind of additional value only available as part of a subscription. This has brought various cries of derision suggesting that the code is no longer good as the community doesn't get to do QA, along with welcoming arms from investors and developers who want to monetize the code.
... Read more
AVC: Do you think the war on stupid culture is unwinnable? Are we headed for Idiocracy?
M: Oh, that's a good question. I think the smart people will get even smarter, and the dumb people will get even dumber. But I think they all will enjoy A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, no matter how you slice it. You know, we keep eating it up. Some of the most intelligent people I know cannot get enough of it. That's a dangerous thing.
It's our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to "hand code" everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.
At my company we've been through this ordeal several times, finally settling in on PHP templates for the corporate site and Atlassian's Confluence for our developer sites. The corporate site still requires manual code intervention but we're modularized enough where the risk vs. reward is still OK. I'm waiting for Matt Asay to give me the green light on the Alfresco web product before we move to a full blown CMS. He knows that I am a difficult customer.
In the meantime I continue to enjoy/loathe our blog system here at CNET that requires us to format HTML. I like the control versus other blog tools, but it gets a little onerous.
So far the event has been a big success and I have been too busy to blog. However, thanks to Cote, who is hosting a few sessions here I now have an update: the muffins and pastries are pretty delicious. Pictured to the left you'll see these oddly shaped (but tasty) mini-muffin loaves that have been the hit of the party.
I just can't repress my love for baked goods. We have a guy from Scripps Network (who own Food Television and many other stations) presenting today and I was demanding he introduce me to all the stars.
There will be more blogging later when Matt Asay gets here and his panel (with Jason Maynard, Larry Augustin, me and Cote) conflicts with the Arsenal game.
If you've got a half-hour, we've got a podcast for you. This week on Open Season, Matt Asay, Ashlee Vance and I talk about a whole lot of nothing, including:
- My MacBook Air (I am still in love)
- XenSource
- Sun
- Lies and damn lies about open source on Intel's website
Earlier this week I went to lunch with Ashlee and Cade from The Register and they were telling me about this giant story that had been in process for weeks. The story "Wikipedia black helicopters circle Utah's Traverse Mountain" is a wild-ride of Wikipedia editing, stock-shorting and false identities that is more like a bad Sandra Bullock movie than it is Web 2.0, but that's not my point.
My point is that for all the naysayers who say that journalism is dying thanks to blogs and social media there is still clearly room for real journalism--the kind of writing that requires research, editing and legal checks.
The blogosphere spends the majority of its time commenting on things that other people write-- which is why despite the plethora of content the majority of it is crap. Even here on CNet both Matt Asay and I have found that the pieces we write that are more in-depth and take longer tend to not get as many hits as the ones that ride the trends. I can only hope Steve Ballmer calls Apple users communists over the weekend to improve my traffic.
- prev
- 1
- next
