Open source résumés

Open source software is not unique to the United States, but America strikes me as one of the least likely places for it to take root. Americans live in a society that regards remuneration as the sole measure of labor’s worth. In business, sweat equity and personal intellectual property are not fungible. We all desire the esteem of our peers — currency among open source engineers — but expecting that regard to pass for capital elsewhere can be deeply disappointing. To strike an analogy, a prospective employer might give more weight to your clean credit history than to your time with the Peace Corps.

“What did you make at your last job?” That question is welcome during an interview — it means you’ve made it past the clubhouse turn. But what if your last job paid nothing? If you spent two years after college doing odd jobs and coding free software in a dorm-size apartment, in my eyes you rock. But just about everybody else will think you’re a slacker. The underachievers who live in mom’s basement and play EverQuest nonstop love to claim connection with open source, but they poison the well for those with legitimate connections who should be able to list open source projects among their accomplishments.

I’m not worldly enough to know how it works elsewhere, but in the States there’s little point in bringing open source experience to the table unless it was part of your coursework. If you list the time you spent working on a free software project on your resume, your recruiter will set you straight: It’s better to leave a blank space or to put down that you were in drug rehab.

Trying to sell the fact that you worked on the “wrong” project makes you one of those dark characters who hacks satellite receivers and smashes windows at G8 summits.

Any technology that allows two or more people to communicate anonymously or privately is a freeway for smugglers of protected content. If you’re bold enough to ply your skills in the field of privacy protection or the field of fair use, be prepared to lead a simple life. You might want to keep a lawyer on retainer. Or you can just wince every time the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) nabs a user of your peer-to-peer software, then go on the news and say you can’t control how your invention is used. A corporation can sue anybody, and filing suit against an individual can bankrupt a fall guy instantly just by serving the papers. It’s got to hurt like hell to have someone’s career and personal life go down just for having used your free software.

Yet amid the strife, with SCO sucking blood here, European software patents looming there, and people being dragged to court for having TCP port 6881 open for connections, open source and the revolutionary social phenomena that derive from it continue to thrive.

Open source may not be your political cup of tea. But if you talk with a job candidate or an employee who’s working in open source, set aside the politics and stereotypes. Let him or her use that experience in a portfolio for a job or promotion. Look up the project and ask the smart questions you’d ask about anyone’s previous gig. You’ll come across both BS artists and the real McCoy among the open source crowd in the same proportion as elsewhere. But resist any urge to simply write off that experience.