How should you, as a person, view open source? From the outside looking in, it rings of advanced knowledge, IT geeks, and other high tech stuff. While some of these assumptions are correct, they only are in a roundabout way. Take a look at Wired’s article, “Why Open Source Software Is Like Burning Man (Only Better)” to gain an understanding of the open source culture and professional world.
Open source developers are atypical to the traditional “locked-in a dark closet” stereotype. They are highly adept and intelligent people with unique interests, but all have the same drive. The article focuses on employees from OpenStack, an open source project founded by NASA and RackSpace. Since its launch, OpenStack has been in high demand and many companies have contributed to it.
What is interesting at OpenStack, when an employee leaves to work for a different company they usually work on the exact same thing they did before:
This isn’t unusual in the world of open source software. When multiple companies contribute to the same project, developers will often move from employer to employer while continuing to work on exactly the same code. It happens with Linux, the open source operating system that gave rise to the free software movement. It happens with Hadoop, the massive numbering-crunching platform that underpins so many of the Web’s biggest names. And it happens with OpenStack — in spades. The team that built the core code has already moved from NASA to RackSpace to a startup called Nebula.
Open source developers tend to move around a lot and in packs. While it may seem that companies are not gaining anything when a project is open source, by hiring an OpenStack employee they are adding that person’s skills to their team when otherwise it would be somewhere else. Open source has led to a new perspective in job options and collaboration between companies. LucidWorks has its own Big Data open source project for search.
Whitney Grace, May 20, 2013
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