OpenStack, GitHub, OmniOS: Three projects, one lesson

A forked project from Oracle’s Solaris, the role of GitHub in preparing legal documents, and the ongoing intrigue at cloud project OpenStack all serve to remind us of a core principle of open source: The exertion of control is a destructive force — while allowing developer communities to organize themselves often yields highly successful results.

Each of these hot topics in open source is quite different, but together they share that same lesson, specifically in how business and community can engage and collaborate.

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OmniOS

When I described the community rising phoenixlike from OpenSolaris a while back, I mentioned the OmniOS project in passing. This week I had a chance to discuss OmniOS with Theo Schlossnagle, CEO of its parent company OmniTI.

OmniOS is a “JeOS” — a Just Enough Operating System, the smallest possible subset of Illumos (formerly OpenSolaris), which is usable as a self-hosted operating system, one needing no external tools to build itself from source. It’s aimed at devops experts who want a rock-solid operating system base for their Web hosting or cloud systems — the sort of people who once would have opted for Solaris, before it became a specialized Oracle system. You can watch the discussion:

Theo casts a fascinating light on the Illumos community. Here we find a variety of groups of developers, each carving its own path through the technology landscape while maintaining a common set of overlapping code. There’s no “control hierarchy”; each group of developers is independent, yet they also understand it’s vital to maintain a common codebase at Illumos.

This is becoming the core reality of open source projects: multiple groups, each driven by a passion for a particular technology aspect, working independently yet coordinating organically. This model comes into sharper focus as the age of directly monetizing software begins to fade and we see companies like Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, and Amazon releasing certain parts of their infrastructure as open source.

GitHub

GitHub is a project hosting system based around the Git version control system created by Linus Torvalds, but its scope is far broader than source code alone. It’s suitable for collaboratively maintained documents and potentially for other shared artifacts.

The big win for GitHub has been that it allows individuals to host open source code without creating any inherent hierarchy of control. Other people can view your code, take their own copy of it (“fork it”), and work independently from you. Any time they want to, they can offer their changes back to you (“make a pull request”), and you can choose whether to accept. All the time your version appears to be the “best,” people will continue to offer their changes to you, but should you ever lose influence over the community you’ve initiated, the changes could stop flowing — or flow elsewhere instead.

This arrangement expresses in code what has been happening in practice at Illumos. Each group of developers is independent, yet they choose to synchronize the overlapping parts of their work in a shared place out of convenience. If anything ever went wrong, it would be relatively simple for that center of gravity to move elsewhere. The very idea of someone trying to exercise “control” does not arise in this worldview.

OpenStack

OpenStack, the open source “cloud operating system,” is really a dozen different projects to standardize management of virtualized data center resources. This week also saw steps toward the first elected board of directors for the OpenStack Foundation. It’s a community with very high market stakes; consequently, high politics can be expected. It’s been no surprise to see signs of submerged gameplay, with allegations of threats against board candidates, as well as a wide, diverse, and in some cases surprising set of nominations.

OpenStack has always been a project living in the shadow of Rackspace. Last year, exactly that issue led to the resignation of its community manager, who alleged:

I think that Rackspace is trying to control Openstack rather than influence it. A perfect example is the recent change in governance. … Rackspace has a choice to make; they can try to control the project and eventually fail, or they choose to influence it and succeed.

Though Rackspace took Rick’s advice in the intervening year and started a foundation, sources suggest to me that a desire for control is still a problem, both in the current governance rules and in the list of candidates for the future executive director of the foundation. But it’s now exacerbated by the arrival of a set of political professionals who know a thing or two about gaming processes and jockeying for control.

I fear the board nomination shenanigans we’ve seen over the last week or so are just the start of a process that is unlikely to be fixed until there’s a clear separation of influence of the kind found in the Eclipse project. At Eclipse, the corporate sponsors have their board seats, and they discuss budgets, brands, and software industry politics, while the technical teams have their own leadership. Decoupling the two, along with clever governance rules in both parts, has rendered the powerful political forces at work in Eclipse unable to disrupt the technical direction.

Control vs. influence

OmniOS, GitHub, and OpenStack together illustrate the difference between destructive impact of control and the positive effects of influence. Contributors to open source projects are motivated by a passion for technology and do not appreciate attempts at unilateral control — either from misguided community leaders or from vendor patrons with too much power. Attempts at control are a form of damage that the mesh of developer relationships routes around. Once the distorting effects of commercial business models are no longer directly imposed, the empowerment of the software freedom brought by open source is allowed to flourish.

Open source can be defined as the co-development of software by a community of people who choose to align a fragment of their self-interest in order to do something that would be almost impossible in isolation. The community members each work at their own (or their employers’) expense in order to achieve a shared outcome that benefits all, including themselves. When they create an enhancement, fix a defect, or participate in a design, they are not “working for free” or “donating their work” so much as they are “participating in co-development.” In other words, they influence the project by contribution and reputation.

Relaxing control leads to community growth and innovation — often in directions that could never have been anticipated. The guiding principle that works for all open source communities is thus: Trade control for influence, because in a meshed society, control gets marginalized and influence delivers success. Your mileage will vary depending on the project, but this basic principle has remained the same for as long as I can remember.

This article, “OpenStack, GitHub, OmniOS: 3 projects, 1 lesson,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of the Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.