Q: What the **** is copen source?
Me: Fair question! Copen source is my chosen development style or methodology. Mostly open source with a little closed thrown in.
Q: Not heard of it I’m afraid. What’s that?
Me: Not surprised really. I’ve just made it up.
Q: Will it succeed?
Me: No idea. I’m not sure it’s been tried before.
Q: Why are you doing it then?
Me: Because I want lots of people to come and help me bake the cake.
Q: What are you talking about?
Me: Well it’s like this. I’ve created what I think is a nice sounding recipe of a cake and I want to get lots of others to come and help me make, bake and taste it. I’m figuring that the more people that come and stick their fingers in the mixing bowl the better the likelihood that the final recipe will be knock-out tasty. The tastier it is the better it will sell, right?
Q: Yeh I guess. What happens when this cake of yours is done?
Me: Well that’s another reason to go down the copen source route. Once the cake is ready then it needs to be decorated. Now not everyone wants their cakes to look the same, do they? So we’ll need lots of others to come and help pretty it up. If there are plenty of people already involvd in the project then we’ll be off to a flying start.
Q: Right … think I get it … can you break it down for me and maybe keep these cakes out of it?
Me: Sure. As the name implies (visually) it’s 80% open source and 20% closed. C-O-P-E-N. These 5 convenient ‘C’ words provide a little more detail of the characteristics from both systems that I’ll look to leverage:
Cost [open]
- Developers will self-organise into teams or work individually (depending on their inclination) which will mean very low management overheads
- They are also involvd for the opportunity of achieving the project’s vision and not solely for monetary compensation. They are here to be part of something great (with the added bonus of employment and share options if the launch goes well)
Capacity [open]
- “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” said a very wise man once. Larger groups of developers coding and fixing bugs can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into solving problems and developing new functionality than they can in smaller closed systems
Capability [open]
- Every open-source project has some kind of under-the-table reputation management system bubbling away. This dictates who in the project exerts the most influence and the best naturally rise to the top
Condition (also read Quality, Reliability and Security) [open]
- Implementations that have been comprehensively peer-reviewed by many can be better trusted to have code that is efficient, scalable and secure. Developers tend to be less territorial over their code in open systems
- Developers who work on their own terms (when, how, on what) are more content and motivated to produce better work, “enjoyment predicts efficiency”
- Open and transparent feedback loops ensure project goals are defined not by management committees but by users alone
- Succession planning naturally occurs in open-source systems which mitigates an otherwise key project risk
Control [closed]
- The development team are located in close geographic proximity as face-to-face requirements events are necessary to shape and define the project. This will result in a more closely bonding team than you would see in open-source and offers a more friendly community dimension
- The code falls under copyright and remains proprietary until such time as network effects have led to market dominance
It is my plan at this time that the platform code will eventually go fully open-source whether this succeeds or fails as a project. Eric Raymond’s discriminators that push towards open source are all there for this project. The reason not to do so at this stage is that for open source to work one of the key rules is:
It’s fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.
Cathedral & Bazaar
From the time the prototype is up-and-running the decision on when and how to go fully open source will be on the table.
The term copen source also has a nice tie in with our location of course —- Copenhagen
Coming soon —– high-level plan, launch of the recruitment campaign
