The crazy-hott company I work for is getting ready to move into new, swanky, techno-stuffed digs. Yesterday was packing day for the delivery center - where my group of super-consultants live - and in honor of the event my grand-boss, Brian Prince, started a little meme: How does an XXX guy pack?
Brian tagged several of his minions with variations of the meme and surprise, surprise... I'm Open Source Guy.
In OSS, this is how we roll...
Similar to how a tools nerd packs, an Open Source guy would first take a look at the lay of the land to see what else is out there. With any luck there is already a similar packing project already up and running.
Not wanting to re-invent the wheel he'd prefer to just join forces with the project that already underway and save some time and energy. In the best case he may not need to pack a single box at all as the community would have done all of that already!
If for some reason that other packing project isn't exactly what OSSG was looking for, no biggie. He'd just fork the project and leverage as many of the already packed boxes as possible and only have to pack a few boxes on his own.
With any luck, he'd find a few other souls that were going through a similar packing/move and they'd decide to join up with OSSG... possibly packing a few boxes for him, maybe just lending a hand here-and-there, or opening bug reports keeping a checklist of TODOs.
Starting a new move...
In the very worst case, OSSG might find there are no existing packing project that meet his needs. In that case he'd need to start one on his own, from scratch.
The first thing he'd do is pick a license, I'm a fan of the New-BSD style license. Then he'd pick a mechanism to host the packing materials, supplies, and packed boxes. He'd want something that provided version control packing history, feature tracker TODO list, issue tracker, a low barrier to entry, etc... Likely something that was FREE (as in beer), scalable, and had some amount of public exposure.
As an agile kinda-guy, and a believer in TDD/BDD, he'd then write some stories. Next he'd move into writing some specs (tests in TDD parlance). These specs would help him clearly define what should happen when the various boxes are packed.
With the specs in hand he'd pack just enough in the boxes to meet his spec, no more... no less. Then he's write a new spec and the implement it, continuing in this pattern ad nauseam.
When OSSG feels he's got a good number of boxes packed, and the move at least underway, he'd announce it to the world and invite others to join him. With some luck he'll drum up some interest and start building a community around this packing project. Working as a team the community would start to contribute and before long boxes are being packed more efficiently, with greater innovation, and fewer broken goods than the commercial moving companies.
The next thing he knows, all of OSSG's boxes have been packed and now the community is actually packing other boxes. And even better, they're filling the boxes with cool and innovative items that he'd never thought of. How exciting!
Commercial packers get involved
Of course after a while those commercial movers catch on and decide to re-implement a half-assed version of the packing project. Then they start peddling it to customers as if its the next silver-bullet, one-size-fits-all solution to all of their packing problems.
Naturally the Twitterati, blog-o-sphere, and mailing lists explode into a series of discussions, flame wars, and trolling.
Not wanting to miss out on an opportunity to be snarky and point out the idiocracy of many involved, some one starts ghost writing a blog to highlight the bitch-and-moan-fest. Soon many realize they can stop following the mailing lists and just get the highlights, chock full of witty and berating banter, directly from the ghost writer.
In the end...
OSSG was able to get all of his boxes, plus lots of other goodies, packed and moved... and he was able to help others along the way.
But after all of the bickering he feels a bit disenfranchised and decides maybe its time to give up on his pipe dream of finding a rich benefactor to pay him to work on building the best OSS packing tools around.
He decides that building real solutions using sound principles is just too much pressure... he'd rather spend his day talking about pie-in-the-sky ideas, with unrealistic goals, never getting his hands dirty with the technologies he's pushing.
So, he becomes a non-coding software architect.