Open Source

Open Source Success Metrics

Ayende Rahien — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:00:00 GMT

I got into a very interesting discussion with Rob Conery recently, talking about, among other things, the CodePlex Foundation. You can hear it TekPub’s Podcast #2, when it is out later this week. Tangential to our discussion, but very important, is how an Open Source project owner defines success for their project.

Usually, when people try to judge if an open source project is successful or not, they look at the number of users, and whatever the general response for the project is positive. But I am involved in a lot of open source projects, so you might say that I have an insider’s view on how the project owner view this.

Now, let us be clear, I am talking about OSS project that are being led by an individual or a group of individuals. There are different semantics for OSS projects that are being led by a company.

There are several reasons for individuals to be involved in OSS projects, those are usually:

Scratch an itch – I want to do something challenging/fun.
Need it for myself – This is something that the owner started because they needed it themselves and open sourced it for their own reasons.
Reputation building – Creating this project would give me some street cred.
I use it at work – Usually applicable for people joining an existing project, they use it at work and contribute stuff that they require.

We must also make a distinction between OSS adoption and OSS contribution. Typically, maybe a tenth of a percent of the adopters would also be contributors. Now, let us talk about the owner’s success metric again. Unless the owner started the project for getting reputation, the number of people adopting your project is pretty meaningless. I think that DHH , the creator of Ruby on Rails, did a great job describing the owner sentiment:

I'm not in this world to create Rails for you. I'm in this world to create Rails for me and if you happen to like that version of Rails that I'm creating for me, than you are going to have a great time.

Even if you are interested in OSS for reputation building, after a while, it stops being a factor. Either you got your reputation, or you never will. A good example of a project started to gain reputation is Rhino Mocks. And you know what, it worked. But I think that it is safe to say that I am no longer just that Rhino Mocks guy, so the same rules applies as for the other motivations.

So, what does it mean, from an owner perspective, when you ask if an OSS project is successful or not? The answer is simple: it does what I need it to do.

I asked a popular OSS project owner the following question: What would your response be if I told you that I am taking a full page ad in the Times magazine proclaiming your stuff to be the best thing since sliced bread? You’ll get a million users out that that.

His response was: Bleh, no!

Tying it back to the discussion that I had with Rob, I feel that much of the confusion with regards to the CodePlex Foundation role is when you try to talk to projects led by individuals as if they were commercial enterprises. The goals are just completely different, and in many cases, adding more users for the project will actually be bad for the project, because it put a higher support cost for the project ream.

In the .NET ecosystem, most of the projects aren’t being led by a company. They are led by individuals. That is an important distinction, and understanding it would probably make it clear why the most common response for the CodePlex Foundation was: What is in it for me?

Impleo – a CMS I can tolerate

Ayende Rahien — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:50:00 GMT

If you head out to http://hibernatingrhinos.com/, you will see that I finally had the time to setup the corporate site. This is still very early, but I have a lot of content to add there, but it is a start.

Impleo, the CMS running the site, doesn’t have any web based interface, instead, it is built explicitly to take advantage of Windows Live Writer and similar tools. The “interface” for editing the site is the MetaWeblog API. This means that in order to edit the site, there isn’t any Wiki syntax to learn, or XML files to edit, or anything of this sort.

You have a powerful editor in your fingertips, one that properly handle things like adding images and other content. This turn the whole experience around. I usually find documentation boring, but I am used to writing in WLW, it is fairly natural to do, and it removes all the pain from the equation.

One of the things that I am trying to do with it is to setup a proper documentation repository for all my open source projects. This isn’t something new, and it is something that most projects have a hard time doing. I strongly believe in making things simple, in reducing friction. What I hope to do is to be able to accept documentation contributions from the community for the OSS projects.

I think that having a full fledged rich text editor in your hands is a game changer, compared to the usual way OSS handle documentation. Take a look at what is needed to make this works, it should take three minutes to get started, no learning curve, no “how do they do this”.

So here is the deal, if you would like to contribute documentation (which can be anything that would help users with the projects), I just made things much easier for you. Please contact me directly and I’ll send you the credentials to be able to edit the site.

Thanks in advance for your support.

The law of unintended consequences

Ayende Rahien — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:53:00 GMT

A while ago I got a tattoo on my forearm (did I mention that you DevTeach is wild?). Here is how it looks like:

To preempt the nitpickers, this was my logo first, I reused it for other stuff afterward (including Rhino Mocks & NH Prof), but it is mine. I did not tattooed NH Prof’s logo.

So a while ago I was buying something in the supermarket and the clerk asked me why I had this tattoo. I told her that I like rhinos, and she said, but it is not a rhino.

Took me a while to realize that from her perspective, it looked like this:

Do you see it? You may need to tilt your head a bit to see it.

I guess that if need be, I can prove that I am OSS aficionado now.

Open Source development model

Ayende Rahien — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 02:39:55 GMT

As someone who does a lot of Open Source stuff, I find myself in an interesting position in the CodePlex Foundation mailing list. I am the one who keep talking about letting things die on the vine if they aren’t successful on their own.

I am going to try to put a lot of discussion into a single (hopefully) coherent post. Most of the points that I am going to bring up are from the point of view of an OSS project that got traction already (has multiple committers, community, outside contribution).

One of the oft repeated themes of the conversation in the CPF mailing list is that the aim is to encourage OSS adoption and contributions to OSS in businesses and corporations.

That sounds nice, but I don’t really get why.

From the business side: if a business don't want to use OSS, then it is in a competitive disadvantage compared to its competitors that do make use of it, since OSS projects tend to make great infrastructure and generate high quality base to work from. If you choose to develop things in house it is going to cost you a lot. And you are likely going to end up with an inferior quality solution.

This is not to disparage someone’s effort, but a OSS project that got traction behind it is likely to have a lot more eyes & attention on it than a one off solution. The Java side has demonstrated that quite clearly.

Even in the .Net world, I can tell you that I am aware of Fortune 50 companies making use of things like NHibernate or Castle. They can most certainly fund building a project of similar size, but it doesn’t make economic sense to do so.

From the project side, if you got enough traction, you don't generally worry about the OSS fearing businesses. It is their loss, none for the project.

It would be more accurate that the project won't feel any pain if a business decide not to use it. Remember that unlike commercial software, OSS projects don't really have an incentive to "sell" more & more.

There is the incentive to grow bigger (for ego reason, if nothing else), get more people involved, add more features, etc. But unless there is some business model behind it (and in the .NET world, there are very few projects with a business model behind them), growing the project usually mean problems for the project team.

As a simple example, Rhino Mocks mailing list has an average of 140 messages per month. I had to scale down my own involvement in the mailing list because it took too much of my time. The NHibernate Users mailing list is crazy, averaging in a thousand messages a month this year alone.

That is even assuming that I want traction for a project, which isn’t always the case. As a good example, I have a lot of stuff that I put out as one-use only solutions. Rhino Igloo is a good example of that, a WebForms MVC framework that we needed for a single project. I built it as OSS, we get contributions for it once in a while. But if it gets to be *very* active, I am going to find myself in a problem, because I don't really want to maintain it anymore.

But in general, for most projects I do want to have more contributors. In the CPF mailing list the issue of getting contributions from companies was brought up as problematic. I disagree, since I don't find that the problems that were brought up (getting corporate and legal sign up for contributing work, getting people to adopt OSS for commercial uses) has any relevance whatsoever to getting more contributors. By far, most contributions that we get for the projects I am involved at are from people making commercial use of them.

But usually, I don’t really care about adoption. I have 15 - 20 OSS projects that I have either founded or am a member of, in exactly one of them I cared about adoption (Rhino Mocks), and that was 5 years ago, mainly because I thought it would give me some credentials when I was looking for a job (and it did).

For all the rest, I am working on those because I need them to solve a problem. I get the benefit that other people are going to look at them and contribute if they feel like it, but mostly, I am working on OSS to solve a problem, the number of users in a project isn't something that I really care about.

There were three scenarios that were discussed in the mailing list that I want to address in particular.

A company would like to pay you 5 times your normal rates, but they have a “no OSS” policy, thus losing the contract.

I have to say that this scenario never happened to me. Oh, I had to talk with the business a lot of time. It is easy to show them why OSS is the safer choice.

Today, that is fairly easy. I can point out stats like this: http://www.ohloh.net/p/nhibernate and that trying to build something like NH is going to cost you in the order of 130 years and ~15 millions dollars. I can tell them that going with MS data access method is a good way to throw good money at upgrading their data access methodology every two years. I can point them to a whole host of people making good use of it.

I got lots of arguments to use. And they tend to work, quite well, in fact. I may need to talk to the lawyers, but that has generally been a pretty straightforward deal. So no, I don't lose clients because of no OSS rule.

Beside, you know what, if they are willing to pay me 5 times my normal rate, I am going to be very explicit about making my preferences made and explaining the benefits. Afterward, they are the client, if they want to may me gobs of money, I am not going to complain even if I am going to use NIH as the root namespace.

Corporate developers have a problem getting permission to use OSS projects in their product or project.

I have seen it happen a few times in the past, but it is growing rarer now. The main problem was never legal, it was the .NET culture more than anything else. The acceptance of OSS as a viable source of software had more to do with team leads and architects accepting that than any legal team putting hurdles in the path.

Oh, you still need to talk to legal before, but you are going to do that when bringing a 3rd party component anyway. (You do make sure to run any commercial legal agreements through the legal department, right? You need to know that there aren’t hooks involved there).

Corporate developers have a problem getting permission to contribute to OSS projects.

Once OSS is adopted, I never run into an issue where legal stopped the contribution of a patch. There are damn good reasons for the business to want this, after all. To that manager, I am going to say: "look, we can maintain it, or we give it to the project, they maintain/fix/debug/improve it. we get great credits and we gain a lot for work we would have done anyway"

A few final thoughts, OSS projects are a dime a dozen. In the .Net space alone there are thousands. Most of them, I have to say, aren’t really that interesting. Out of those thousands of projects, there are going to be a few that would get traction, attract additional committers, outside contributions and a community.

I think it would be safe to say that there are around fifty such projects in the .Net space. There is nothing particularly noble or important in an OSS project that requires special treatment. If it gets enough attention, it will live on. If it doesn’t, who cares (except maybe the author)?

The CodePlex Foundation, however it may end up as, is going to be dealing with the top fifty or so projects, simply because trying to reach the long tail of OSS projects is a futile task. I mentioned what I think would be good ways of helping the top projects (resources, coaching, money).

Another approach would be to turn it around, the CPF can focus on building a viable business model for OSS projects. A healthy OSS project is one that makes money for the people who contribute to it. It may be directly or indirectly, but if it isn’t going to do that, it isn’t going to live long. A labor of love would keep one or two committers working on a project, but it wouldn’t generally sustain a team.

Finally, something that I think seems to get lost in all the noise around it, Open Source projects are about the code. I hear a lot about legal issues, making business adopt OSS, etc. I don’t see discussion about the main thing.

Show me the code!

CodePlex Foundation

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 21:15:14 GMT

I wanted to drop a few words about CodePlex Foundation.

To preempt the snarky comments, no I have no knowledge about the foundation beyond what was made public.

The CodePlex Foundation is apparently about:

Enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities.

That is good on several levels.

It is another stepping stone in making OSS an acceptable solution in the .NET eco system.
It is explicitly setup to encourage the use of OSS in commercial settings.

It is still way to early to tell, but my hope is that it will become a platform on top of which OSS projects and contributors can build a commercially viable solutions. Working on OSS is hard, when you have to donate all your time and energy.

Ideally, I would like to see a the foundation work to make it happen. I have some ideas about this, such as sponsoring outright some of the projects, or contributing resources for things like build servers, tech writers, support system, etc.

Can you make money on OSS tooling in the .NET world?

Ayende Rahien — Sat, 23 May 2009 11:56:58 GMT

The answer is yes. Here is a chart of downloads and orders of NH Prof.

I am fairly happy with the way NH Prof sells. I think it could be better, but I want to see what happens to sales when I release the v1.0 version (which will be soon).

Nitpicker corner: Numbers has been removed from the chart for a reason.

The state of Open Source in the .NET ecosystem: A five year summary

Ayende Rahien — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:50:00 GMT

I have been forcibly reminded lately that I have been doing this for quite some time. In fact, I have been doing working with Open Source on the .Net platform for over 5 years now. And a few conversations with friends have given me quite a retrospective on the state of OSS.Net.

5 years ago, it was 2004, .Net 1.1 was still a hot thing, and Stored Procedures on top of datasets where still a raging debate. Open source was considered a threat and Steve Balmer was busy blasting at any OSS project that showed up. The very existence or need for OSS on the .NET platform was frequently questioned.

I remember trying to find work in 2005, after over a year of actively working on Open Source projects and with Rhino Mocks making steady but sure progress in the .NET TDD community and not being able to leverage that experience into job interviews. It was only commercial experience that counted for the gate keepers.

The last 5 years have been quite interesting in the .NET ecosystem from the OSS world. It has gotten to the point where the use of OSS tools, frameworks and platforms is no longer a strange exception, but is quite common place.

There are several data points on which I am basing this statement:

Books about OSS projects are commonly published.
Microsoft is doing a lot to encourage OSS on the .Net platform.
NHibernate’s download numbers are consistently above ten thousands a month, usually closer or above twenty thousands a month.
I released Windsor 2.0 not even two weeks ago, and it has over 1,200 downloads already.
The number of messages to the NHibernate users mailing list is usually above a thousands per month.
My NHibernate course sold out and I have to do a repeat course to satisfy demand.

And then, there is my own experience, both as a member in the community and as a consultant. I see OSS being used quite often. A lot of my engagements are about OSS tools and framework, and I am rarely the person to introduce them into the company.

I think that there are several factors playing around here, but most of that is around maturity. The OSS players in the .NET world had had some time to work on things, and most established projects have been around for years. NHibernate is 6 years old, Castle is 5, Rhino Mocks 4. It is not the Open Source world that represent stability. With Microsoft replacing their data access strategy every two years, it might be best to use NHibernate, because it has been around for a long time already.

There is also the issue of maturity in the ecosystem itself. It has became quite clear that it is acceptable and even desirable to use OSS projects. And we have companies making explicit decisions to support Open Source projects (iMeta decision to donate 3 dev months is just one example, although the most prominent one). Recently I was working with a client on strategies for Open Sourcing their software, and how to manage a good Open Source project. In another client, a decision has been reached to put all the infrastructure stuff as Open Source, even newly developed one, because they are infrastructure. Infrastructure is seen as a commodity, and as such, there is little value in trying to make it unique.

There is a lot of value, however, in making it Open Source and accepting improvements from others. And I was able to point out to that client how outside contributions to the infrastructure has enabled us to do things that we would have to do ourselves.

Things are changing, I don’t think that we are at the balance point yet, but I think that we are seeing a very big shift, happening very very slowly. And from the Open Source perspective, things are looking quite good.

Castle Windsor 2.0 RTM Released

Ayende Rahien — Mon, 04 May 2009 22:22:51 GMT

Some would say that it is about time, I would agree. Windsor might not be the OSS project in pre release state for the longest time (I think that the honor belong to Hurd), but it spent enough time at that state to at least deserve a honorary mention.

That was mostly because, although Windsor was production ready for the last three or four years or so, most of the people making use of it were happy to make use of the trunk version.

If you will look, you won’t find Windsor 1.0, only release candidates for 1.0. As I believe I mentioned, Windsor has been production ready for a long time, and for the full release we decided to skip the 1.0 designator, which doesn’t really fit, and go directly to 2.0

The last Windsor release (RC3) was almost a year and a half ago, and in the meantime, much has improved in Windsor land. Adding upon the already superb engine and facilities, we have fitted Windsor to the 3.5 release of the .Net framework, created a full fledged fluent API to support easy configuration, allowed more granular control over the behavior of the container when selecting components and handlers and improved overall performance.

All in all, pretty good stuff, even if I say so myself. Just to give you an idea, the list of changes from the previous release goes for quite a while, so I am going to let the short listing above to stand in its place.

You can get the new release from the source forge site.

Ayende's Open Source Project Maturity Model

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:53:55 GMT

From my point of view, there is a very easy model for the maturity of an Open Source project. Look at the answers in the project's mailing list. The questions do no matter.

The model is simple, the higher the percentage of answers given by non project members, the more mature the project is.

NHProf, Open Source, Licensing and a WTF in a good sense

Ayende Rahien — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:17:19 GMT

I have a Google alert setup for NH Prof.

I got the following alert.

I was willing to mutter a few choice curses and let it go, because there really isn't much that you can do about this. But then I followed up on the rest of the thread.

Um... thanks? I mean, I sure appreciate the sentiment.

But the fun continues...

And the replies...

Honestly, I wouldn't believe it if I didn't see it with my own eyes.

acexman & cluka, thanks.

Oufti, I don't think that I like you very much.