Paul ‘chip’ Querna: Facebook & Open Source: Community is just as important as the Code

When you create an open source project, you gain almost nothing but a PR hit if there isn’t a community built around it. [..]

Just look at the massive community that has exploded around Apache Lucene and Apache Hadoop — Yahoo could of kept this infrastructure project internal, and sure, it might of fulfilled their original goals, but they wouldn’t of ever received the thousands of external contributions, which has turned the Lucene/Hadoop world into one of the most diverse and thriving open source communities of late, giving Yahoo a thousand times return on their investment in Hadoop.

Paul discusses the importance of letting company-created open source projects thrive by fostering a vivid community, and encouraging their use in competitors’ products against what might be considered common business sense.

Consider the contrast between two of Apple best-known open source projects: the earliest, Darwin, never took off the way Jobs had promised (and perhaps hoped for) back in 1999. Projects such as OpenDarwin (which eventually shut down), PureDarwin, GNU-Darwin have always lacked proper leadership and interest and suffered under opaque, unclear, apparently inconsistent policies on Apple’s part.

On the other hand, there’s WebKit: once given a proper website with a public blog, issue tracker and repository and allowing external reviewers, its success exploded — and in spite of the fact that many of Apple’s competitors now use it, Apple, too, reaps rewards. The sum of the contributions simply exceeds the initial loss of control and propriety by a wide margin.

Perhaps this kind of success is only possible with a limited amount of projects, but as a company, you have to be willing to take that risk.