Why do you waste so many time - and money - with community contributions?I don't have a definite answer; It's not by some "revolutionary principle", in the end I want the same thing as everyone - get rich, retire, and move to some beach in Brazil and sell coconuts for the rest of my life.
There are a lot of logical reasons why I should *not* contribute:
- It requires huge ammount of time to maintain a project / make contributions
- I'm giving away knowledge - for free
- I'm allowing others to make profit out of my work with 0 return
- Could basically... sell it / commercialize it in some way
Still - I do it cause I feel it's the right thing to do. For a living, I benefit from the work others did - namely the work done by Pentaho guys. Commercial Open Source is still a relatively unknown area and there's a difficult balance between knowledge-sharing and kid-feeding ;)
But sometimes we get some very unexpected revenues; I had a meeting with a potential client that asked me if we could make a demonstration of our work; I was taken by surprise and was not ready to do so, but then I remembered asking if they had a downloaded version of Pentaho version 3. They did. "Great, now open the CDF samples under the bi-developers solution. We did that". Quoting mastercard... Priceless!
ps: I believe this kind of permanent debate inside me is exactly the same as happens daily in the Pentaho Towers between sales and marketing and o-s defenders; So I'm definitely not one of the voices that rises in complains when Pentaho HQ (or any other vendor, for what it matters) decides to relase some subscription module; what ever the decision is, it's a hell of a tough balance to make...
2 comments:
Hi Pedro,
Great blog with a "front line" perspective on community contribution, and thanks again for everything you continue to contribute.
Minor clarification on the debates inside the Pentaho towers. They absolutely happen, frequently, and they're healthy, and fairly common at other open source companies from what I hear.
It's not really "sales and marketing" vs. "o-s defenders." If that's what you've heard from our team, then we're over-simplifying, and I mention this to give perspective, not to defend sales/marketing. All Pentaho departments, and the Pentaho community are all part of the same big team at some level.
Our engineers want the company to make money, and there are different opinions on ways to do that (i.e. which features become enterprise-edition only). And sales and marketing want us to have a large, vigorous community because it makes the products better, expands usage, and creates "evangelism" of Pentaho outside of the walls of the company. In the case of the CDF, most of the marketing team was lobbying to adjust the 3.0 release schedule so that we could incorporate the CDF and make the dashboard designer work with it. Sales mostly just wanted the product as quickly as possible. So anyway, it's not just a situation where sales and marketing want EE-only features and engineering wants 100% open source. We all have different perspectives and ideas on how to grow and serve our community, achieve our commercial objectives, etc. The day the debates and discussions stop is the day we've either 1) "perfected" the approach or 2) stopped caring, and I see both of those as highly unlikely. ;-)
Worth mentioning - I don't think anybody on the team would have been educated enough to even have that discussion without the CDF demo and Q&A you gave us, so thanks again for that as well.
-Lance
Pentaho
Hello Lance, thanks for the comments.
When I mentioned "sales and marketing" vs. "o-s defenders" I wasn't labeling persons or departments, but opinions. And it's, indeed, a very healthy war that could lead to nasty results if it's not taken seriously.
It's not a critic, on the contrary; "Money" is almost a tabu when the subject is open-source, and that needs to change - OS based companies need to make money to be successful, and the same goes for the surrounding environment - including me.
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