i’m being interviewed by open enterprise trends about my recent piece on advogato.

1. What “lesson learned” about getting different open Source projects to work together did you learn from SlideML?
– micro steps are preferable to lofty goals that you never reach anyway
– the same technical issues pops up in different environments, you just need to find a common language to recognize that you are sitting in the same boat

2. What are the “hazards” a developer team should be aware of when they begin to introduce Open Source into a commercial enterprise? (For instance, with commercial software, the conclusion is almost ALWAYS that the software from Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and others WILL work together — even if they have to spend millions with a professional integration services firm to do it).

not all open source software has a sufficiently large community to support its further development. becoming a respected open source citizen takes some work, but is crucial for organizations if they ever want to roll back their modifications into the main line of development. getting support is also much easier if a community respects you. this usually means organizations have to adopt a humble approach towards open source communities. ibm was not welcomed to apache by virtue of its brand, but rather each ibm employee had to prove his worth by valuable contributions. given enough resources, open source software of course integrates even better than proprietary software because all pieces can be molded as needed. for practical purposes it makes much more sense to look out for standards support (see below)

3. You mention a key lesson learned from CMSML: [From your article “Lesson: Don’t be afraid of the proprietary world, and seek collaboration for open standards with it wherever possible.”] Can we drill down on that idea a bit? How would you suggest an Open Source and/or commercial developer team “seek” such collaboration? Would you suggest how to do that, for instance, when working with Apache/Tomcat. PHP or MySQL?

there are many areas (file formats, internet standards, naming conventions) that are the low-hanging fruit for both sides. if you observe the blog ecosystem you will notice that individuals from competing firms nevertheless collaborate on technical issues and share implementation experiences. (sam ruby (ibm) links to don box (microsoft) and so on) let the individuals touch base. engineers can relate to each other, never mind the politics of open vs closed. that’s how we did it.

4. What’s your take on the emergence of “open standards” for commercial products, such as C#, JBoss for instance? Does this “middle ground” present something that open Source developers should be in favor of, rather than against?

absolutely. open standards are crucial. applied correctly, they enable the emergence of vast software ecosystems. the emergence of the internet both wouldn’t have been possible without, and greatly promoted the value of open standards. open standards are not really a middle ground. i view them as somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether the source is open or not. there are open source programs with undocumented file formats that are in essence no better than any proprietary program because it is just not cost-effective to glean the format from the source code. the oft-heard argument that because you can reverse-engineer a format with the help of the source code, that software is “open” is fallacious.
for all practical purposes, organizations do not have the resources to undertake that effort, and they thus are not really able to hedge against closed formats by picking open source programs.

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