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A Post-Open Source World
By Don Goodman-Wilson
(Text of a talk given at the OSI’s State of the Source Summit. Original video available on YouTube) Open source has always been a grassroots movement for freedom. But moneyed and powerful interests have taken advantage of the structure of open source, and transformed it into a tool for maintaining a status quo that favors the already powerful. Open source has done a lot of good, but the laissez-faire, libertarian approach to structuring our community and our mission has left us in a place where it’s an effective tool for removing freedom.
Read more…The Coming Post-Open Source World
By Don Goodman-Wilson
(This post is a preview of my upcoming talk “Thoughts on a Post-Open Source World”, to be given at the first State of the Source Summit in September. You can read the full text of the talk here.) Open source, as a mindset and a set of legal constructs, used to be a grassroots movement that so very cleverly co-opted the legal framework of intellectual property to create a space for radical anarchic liberty, a place where anyone was welcome to contribute to a growing body of software designed to undermine corporate oligarchs and empower individuals with powerful new tools.
Read more…The Value of Ethical Thinking
By Don Goodman-Wilson
I believe that the study of ethics can be a powerful lens for thinking about what we do as developer relations professionals. The connection is simple, but not very obvious. The reason is that I think many folks (very reasonably) misunderstand just what ethics is. When I talk about ethics, I often encounter a resistance that surprises me. I am often asked what gives me the right to impose my morality on others, others who may not share my own moral assumptions.
Read more…Open Source is Broken
By Don Goodman-Wilson
The Open Source movement, as championed by the OSI, prizes absolute openness above all other concerns. Openness, they claim, is an absolute good, from which all other virtues flow, not to be questioned or criticized. It doesn’t matter if that openness enables evil in the world, without openness we cannot have truly collaborative software development communities. So the claim goes. I want to question this claim. Openness seems like a good thing, but I think there’s plenty of room for disagreement.
Read more…DevRel × Sales
By Don Goodman-Wilson
We’re all on a boat. The same boat. Together.
Take a long hard look.
Tl;dr. Developer relations is not a cost center, but a revenue center, whose goals are closely tied to sales’s goals. And this is good news, because now we have something interesting to measure. And we’re just going to have to get over it.
Read more…DevRel is about scaling trust
By Don Goodman-Wilson
Come with me if you want to build cool things
You and me, we do DevRel. Let’s take a moment and be blunt.
DevRel is, for me, about building—and scaling—trust. Trust and awareness. Trust and awareness and a business case for international travel. But I get ahead of myself. Let’s talk about trust.
Look — if we want our products to be no-brainers for people to choose (and who doesn’t?), we have an enormous task ahead of us, one of building trust. Without trust, not using our product is the easy decision. To make using it an automatic choice requires intense, widespread trust.
We want developers to automatically turn to our product or tool. We need them — perhaps all of them — to believe in the value of our tool implicitly, which means trusting us, the people behind the tool, implicitly.
That’s tough.
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