Talk 7: When the Money Comes

This talk is a panel including David Recordon, who worked on LiveJournal for about two years before moving on recently to another opportunity at Verisign.  I don't know everybody else on the panel, but one is Tim O'Reilly.

Sadly, I was about 15 minutes late to the talk, so I'm trying to catch up and figure out what's going on.

Conversation currently seems to be encouraging some sort of craftsman model.  You have people who are new, who become apprentices to masters who are building things.  Someone now arguing that's not very useful, as ... I don't know.  Something about if you work for a company and leave, you don't want that sort of shake-ups?

Lots of talk about how too much money can be as bad as too little.  Also you don't want to isolate people from market pressure?  O'Reilly gave Larry Wall money to work only on Perl, and hence you've got Perl 6 the Performance Art, which is still not out.  (For the record, he does not regret funding Larry.)

There's an entirely different electricity in this room, too.  This is... somewhat adversarial.  Lots of bristling going on, people seeming to attack and defend.  No outright hostility, but it just feels that way in here.  It's interesting and strange.  (Ben thinks that it's not yet at this point, but could take this turn.  Hmm.)

Now they're asking for predictions.

"Two-thirds of all acquisitions ultimately fail" was just stated.  I didn't know that - she said it's an axiom, I don't remember if that word means fact, or theory.  Now they're changing the question up ... what happens when founders leave, post-acquisition.  Some cases are fine, some are not.  "If there's a strong community, then there will be some chaos.  Thankfully, Open Source has the ultimate control - you can fork the codebase."  Not really useful for social network type things.

Tim O'Reilly thinks that things are always changing.  It's not necessarily true that the acquisitions will end up killing Open Source.  The future may have no Open Source movement, but it will still have the hacker impulse.  "It's not about Open Source, it's about the hacker impulse."  So whether or not the future has people like Tatsuhiko making Plagger or Brad making LJ or Ben making MT, the future will still have hackers.  Things wlil change, yes, but things will always be the same.

David Recordon says, "Don't lose the hacker mentality.  Continue doing cool stuff, and continue innovating.  Don't give up, if you really believe you need to represent something, take the chances and take the risk.  Preserve the ideals.  It's not all about cultures meshing, it's about ideals.  If you don't represent your ideals in the corporate culture, you're doing a big disservice to the Open Source movement."

I don't know the next guy (Cliff Schmidt?), he is saying that the acquisition of Geronimo by IBM (not quite an acquisition?) has injected a lot of energy into the project.  A lot of different energy.  Says that Open Source is becoming more mainstream, more common.  He looks forward to when Open Source is not something that people have "Open Source Coordinators" employees for, when it just ... is.

Denise says to "throw your body in front of the train, it really doesn't hurt that much to get run over".  Hold together, keep the fight, keep it going.  There will be pendulum swings, either people will accept it, or something new will come along.  Doesn't want to lose what we have.

"Educating corporations is always second to us doing what we want to do.  Do what you find interesting.  Corporations will be interested if people are interested.  Don't lose your power by trying to find the money."