Making an open-source living, part 1

However, Noels feels that with this approach the customer doesn't necessarily get the best deal, so will often approach things differently. "We try to skip the subcontracting stuff, because we think the customer should be the owner of the project, and he must be aware of the importance of such constructs, and the best way to make him aware of that is to put the problem in his hands, and to say OK, so you know you need two Cocoon folks, you need one JBoss guy, three general Java developers. Now you can go to an integrator and say "solve this problem for me," and that's how most integrator shops work, by providing a turnkey solution. The problem with this is that quite often, towards the end of the process, it becomes quite clear that the customer is buying a turnkey solution. He's not able to open up the hood any more and see what's happened, and with whom it's happened. You ask who has being doing this part of the project to be told: 'Oh, that was a guy we contracted for six weeks for that specific part, but now he's left.' It's quite difficult for the customer to understand who has been doing what."

Avoiding this problem is what has led to Outerthought's use of an open-source style collaboration with their customers. "What we tend to do, if the customer is willing, is to discuss with them the hiring in of other partners in areas we don't specialise in, and for the customer to manage the projects in a classic project management sense, but also manage the knowledge transfer process, so that if I want one of my internal developers to understand this part of the project, I need to sit them next to that guy so he's aware of what's going on. That's also very comparable with the open-source environment."

Since Noels has found the collaborative development model to be so useful, does he think open-source developers are better team players? "No. They're no different. You have the same personality clashes you have in a closed corporate environment. I think the difference is that everything happens out in the open. You're just trying to show the best of what you can do, because you know lots of people are looking at you, so the aspect of peer pressure is very important."

But the pressure isn't a problem: "It's a nice, challenging peer pressure. You know that I'm going to create something, and because you know that more than just my boss and three colleagues are going to read it, it will be 40 committers to a project, and there might be 600 people lurking on the mailing list, so you don't know who's going to be reading it. You still have the ego clashes and little battles, but it's toned down a level."

In the second part of the interview, published next week, we discuss how Noels got involved with the Apache Software Foundation, and how he balances work with his contributions to the community