Establishing trust with your open source community
Yesterday was kind of a bummer for open source communities everywhere. We saw an open source company (MySQL) compromising the trust they have with their community. MySQL announced that they will only offer certain features to paying customers. Take a look at Jeremy’s blog for more commentary. They have forked their community release and one must now wonder what goes next. Building creditability is always a difficult task for one to achieve. It takes hard work every day, building innovative, robust products, adding value in everything you do, responding to customer queries, and doing what you say you will do. The latter being most important - open source is about open code. It is about sharing your work so others can contribute, use, provide feedback, etc.
At Ingres, we are working very hard to grow and build our community. We are always looking for guidance and new ideas on how to build a robust community. We have a number of activities underway with various universities, partners, customers, users and are looking for more each day. I worked at Red Hat for years where knowledge was always plentiful and we never compromised our creditability with our community. This is a trait we are building at Ingres as well. The industry has responded over the years with a strong vote of support for the open source model and it is surprising and sad to see MySQL take such a turn.
/deb woods
Tags: ingres, mysql, open source