Community: The Telltale Heart of Open Source

March 21st, 2007 javier

At the heart of every good open source project is a vibrant community. But what is the measure that your community is successful? Is it the first time someone contributed a patch? Wrote up some documentation? Wrote a plugin? Really, there’s no easy way to tell when a community catches fire, but when all of the above happen in tandem, it’s a good sign that you’re at least on the right track. And it gives us the opportunity to call out some of the more stellar contributions.

1. Hyperic HQ on OS X. We’ve always made sure that HQ - both server and agent - worked on OS X, but we never contributed any time to getting it to launch at system startup. Some friends at Maccius (www.maccius.com), an MSP, wrote up some docs to do just that. You can view them here.
2. Patch for HQ bug. It turns out that HQ didn’t work as expected when gathering JMX data in certain situations. So, we were pleased when forums user ‘nickbr’ not only discovered the bug, but also submitted a bug fix. You can see his contribution here.
3. Plug-in for Asterisk. Asterisk is a great project for open source telephony software. And now, forums user ‘critch’ has contributed an Asterisk plugin so users can more easily manage their Asterisk deployment with HQ. Here’s a discussion about Asterisk plugin creation.
4. Users Answer Users: When the forum starts giving back and not only answering, but helping to contribute fixes to other users, you know you’ve got something good. Take Brad Felmey for instance, one of our super users who knows his way around the software and knows how to provide patches. Every project needs a Brad Felmey… or 10! Here’s an example of Brad helping other users (and even teaches John Mark something in the process!)

All of these things are what we had in mind when we released HQ under the GPL. In fact, it’s the driving force behind any open source software - a strong community will make or break a project. Some people like to brag about downloads as the penultimate metric of success, but it says nothing of how people are using it and interested in it. An active community will show the true heartbeat of a projects success.

Entry Filed under: Contributors, Javiers Blog