Bringing Open Source Software Collaboration Practices and Principles to Corporate Environments

Jun. 5, 2006 09:00 AM

Open Source software development communities have evolved a very unique combination of tools, practices, and principles for coordinating their development activities. The inherent transparency in a well-run Open Source project makes it possible for developers to discover existing efforts and get up to speed on what's happening, and for developers of similar projects to combine efforts. The volunteer nature of well-run projects, where the activity is a sort of managed chaos amongst peers rather than a hierarchical pre-planned approach, allows for greater innovation and a tighter coordination between end-users and developers than standard methodologies do. The liberty guaranteed by an Open Source license also means that the cost of failure to productively collaborate is lower, and thus, greater risk can be taken. These concepts are directly translatable to an enterprise software development environment. There are approaches to reconcile the opportunistic approach of voluntary collaboration with the need to commit to features and dates and quality. In this session, Brian will talk about how such development can be done, and will discuss several organizations that have adopted such an approach and the benefits they have seen.

About Brian Behlendorf
Brian Behlendorf founded CollabNet, with O'Reilly & Associates, in July 1999. CollabNet provides on-demand distributed software development solutions and is the primary sponsor of the award-winning Subversion open source project. Before launching CollabNet, Behlendorf was co-founder and CTO of Organic Online, a Web design and engineering consultancy located in San Francisco. During his five years at Organic, Behlendorf helped create Internet strategies for dozens of Fortune 500 companies. During that time, he co-founded and contributed heavily to the Apache Web Server Project, co-founded and supported the VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) effort, and assisted several IETF working groups, particularly the HTTP standardization effort. Before starting Organic, Behlendorf was the first Chief Engineer at Wired Magazine and later HotWired, one of the first large-scale publishing Web sites. He is currently a Director of the Mozilla Foundation and a retired Director and President of the Apache Software Foundation. In 2006, Behlendorf was named a Young Global Leader, an affiliate program of the World Economic Forum. Among his many books are Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, and Running a Perfect Web Site with Apache.