You meet the nicest people In Open Source

(Names and sites withheld, lest this be perceived as name-dropping.)

I was trolling the newsgroups of an open source community a week or so back and posted a message to one of its many groups (they actually still use honest-to-goodness NNTP news:// groups, rather than some crazy new forum software). I got a response back from one of the newsgroup denizens We'll call him Matt -- not his real name.

Matt was quite helpful and encouraging. He even responded positively to an offline email I sent him offering to help on the particular issue at hand. Matt's general response to my message was essentially: "I appreciate your enthusiasm and it's great that you want to help. I don't generally get involved in the day-to-day operation of our projects, so you should keep an eye on the newsgroups for further developments." I thought this was an odd thing to say from someone who was involved enough to respond to news messages on a fairly narrowly-focused topic.

In Matt's offline email (offline in the sense that it was away from the newsgroup, cuz, you know, it's kind of tough to exchange email around the world when you're truly "offline") I finally caught his title, which was missing from his newsgroups posts: Executive Director. Turns out Matt, this very nice, very helpful fella, who was quite encouraging and supportive, was the executive freakin' Director of the organization I was visiting. I was completely floored.

Now, you have to understand that this organization is one of the hottest Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) efforts on the web today. Trust me on this: Matt is a very, very busy guy. In fact, as it turned out, he was writing to me from Japan, though he lives in North America.

When was the last time you wrote to a company and the CIO, the CTO or CEO (the corporate equivalent of Matt's position) responded to your email? You don't get this kind of personal touch in the commercial software world.

When we speak of the "Open Source Community," "community" isn't a hollow term. I'm continually amazed at the giving nature of so many of the folks involved with F/OSS. And the fact that an Executive Director, busy on a business trip to Japan, would make the time to answer what was essentially an unimportant message only reinforces this notion.

I don't think commercial software is ever going to die. However, more and more of the software marketplace will be "overrun" by F/OSS software. This is due entirely to the selflessness of the players involved that F/OSS works so well. Also telling is that commercial software companies are also recognizing the value of F/OSS and are actually employing people, and paying them salaries, to reward their heretofore un-remunerated selflessness. Red Hat, IBM, Sun, Oracle and even Microsoft (see FlexWiki, WiX and WTL) all have Open Source projects underway.

Raising good software takes a village -- luckily the F/OSS villagers are community-spirited, so great software is sprouting up all over the place.