Here's an interview with Wilfredo Sanchez, an interesting programmer who was, until last week, the lead open source developer on Apple's Darwin project, and who is now the "open source program manager" at knownow (a just out of stealth mode p2p/2-way-web sort of thingie.) Basically the interview is talking about open source development in general. W.S. has a nice middle of the road (to me) attitude that seems very reasonable (unlike some voices in the open source world.) It's not about the license, or the code per se, it's about the community of people that can form around such projects."The way I think about it, a
community is a group of people with some interest in a given problem space and a vision for how to
tackle it and what to do with the result. They tend to rally around some code, because code sets
some nice boundaries for the scope of that problem space, but the code might be tossed out and
re-written or otherwise modified and extended to reflect the vision of the group, which evolves the
members discover new ideas, or the membership changes.
The successful communities I know about have some common characteristics: They tend to have a
core group of some manageable size, which is generally comprised of the most active developers,
but also of other people who are known to understand the problem space well. The core group and
the code are what provide continuity and direction, and they roughly represent the vision of the whole
group."
i think i read that former blogmeister matt haughey got a job at knowhow.
Yes, evidently this is true. The company is run by Rohit Khare who is the man responsible for (amoung other things) the influential FoRK mailing list (Friends of Rohit Khare.) Here are the FoRK archives if you want to take a look. Lots of big names on that list. Knownow is some sort of all-star team, although I still can't grok exactly what they are doing. They sure are getting lots of hype though, and lots of big people seem to be working for them, so it must be something cool.
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- jim 2-18-2001 3:17 pm
i think i read that former blogmeister matt haughey got a job at knowhow.
- dave 2-18-2001 4:58 pm
Yes, evidently this is true. The company is run by Rohit Khare who is the man responsible for (amoung other things) the influential FoRK mailing list (Friends of Rohit Khare.) Here are the FoRK archives if you want to take a look. Lots of big names on that list. Knownow is some sort of all-star team, although I still can't grok exactly what they are doing. They sure are getting lots of hype though, and lots of big people seem to be working for them, so it must be something cool.
- jim 2-20-2001 6:58 pm