In this article, the author combines his personal experience to explain the community, open source and commercialization in his eyes. You might as well take a look. I've been working in the developer community for the past 6 years.

editor's introduction: What kind of enterprise needs a developer community? What is the purpose and path of building a community? Nowadays, the maturity of technology has given us more opportunities. Under such opportunities, how can we grasp our "original intention"? In this article, the author combines his personal experience to explain the community, open source and commercialization in his eyes. You might as well take a look.

This can be a story that starts with using love to generate electricity, but it should not be a story that only relies on using love to generate electricity.

1. A story that started in the community

1. Why have I been working in the community?

I have been working in the developer community for the past 6 years. From InfoQ to Nuggets, I have met so many developers and technical experts of all kinds in the past six years, and I have established deep friendships with marketing and public relations students from various major companies. This is the most precious experience I have had in the past few years. A fortune.

In February this year, I chose to write naked words. Ordinarily, as a person who is nearly 30 years old, has a mortgage and rent, and is still crawling out of the bottomless pit of decoration, I should not have the confidence to do so. But I am indeed so ordinary but confident. This confidence comes from my understanding:

This is the best era for technology, this is the best era for developers, and this is also the best era for developer relations/operation personnel .

Against this background, I have witnessed the rapid development period of the Chinese developer community.

• From the perspective of third-party developer communities, CSDN, InfoQ, 51CTO, Sifou, Nuggets, these established or emerging developer communities are all developing very rapidly, and emerging communities are even trying to catch up.
• From the perspective of enterprise self-built developer communities, whether it is Yunqi Community, Yunjia Community, Huawei Developer Community and other established communities with accumulated experience, or Internet upstarts starting anew, the concept of community has become more popular.
• From the perspective of open source and foundation , the Linux Foundation and CNCF are expanding rapidly in China, and the local Gitee, Mulan protocol, and the Open Atomic Open Source Foundation have also begun to grow.

All these changes can ultimately be traced back to the above sentence - this is the best era of technology. Fortunately, a liberal arts student like me can ride on this wave and reap the so-called dividends of the times. The development of the

community has certainly exceeded many people's expectations, and it has also led many major Internet companies that have not understood why they want to build communities to follow suit and start communities. But if I really want to tell you what it feels like to be a community member, maybe thousands of words can only be summed up in one sentence - use love to generate electricity.

2. Why is the community suffering?

When I chose to change jobs in February, the advice many people gave me was: you need to go where you are closest to your business (money). One of the reasons why I changed jobs was because I felt that I needed to change or even transform.

I was indeed looking for a job in this direction. I contacted the marketing departments of several leading cloud vendors and got offers, but in the end I chose to stay in the developer community. The story behind this is... It’s a twist and turn, and I can’t explain it for a while. Maybe after two years, I can sort out this work experience of mine more clearly. But one thing is for sure, being in the community is really hard.

On the one hand, our type of talents are indeed favored by major manufacturers, but on the other hand, many times we are not able to explain our value accurately and convincingly. Colleagues in this industry rarely become enemies. More often than not, they join groups to keep each other warm and complain to each other.

is based on the current situation of "power generation with love" in the developer community. It is often difficult for us to convince the boss what business value can be generated behind this matter, let alone how much budget we can get to achieve what results. KPI is very heavy, ROI It is very low, so students who can do a good job in running the developer community often write PPT very well...

also has various problems for the developer community itself.It is difficult for us to convince our bosses to recognize the value of developer operations. How can a community boss convince his boss of the value of a developer community? I have seen too many tragedies where community bosses have been replaced, or even entire communities have been cut off.

Most developer communities are too far away from the business. They are often positioned as a support department. To put it nicely, it may be called a "middle office" department, but in fact it is just a handyman. The business department may not recognize the value of the community, and it is difficult for the community itself to get support from the business department - if you don't make money, why are you so poor? Go and cool off.

3. What kind of enterprise really needs a developer community?

In my opinion, there are actually only two types of companies that have strong demand for the developer community:

One type is the leading cloud vendors, and the other is open source companies.

For the former, the developer community is more about cultivating potential customers of cloud products.

I have seen a report before, and the data in it shows that technology procurement decisions within enterprises have begun to have a bottom-up trend. If cloud vendors can establish a good developer base, the transformation of their cloud services will indeed be help. For smaller cloud vendors, it is more reasonable to build a vertical open source project community, such as Qingyun's KubeSphere. For those cloud vendors that are just starting out but are ambitious, they still consider more about the business conversion of head customers rather than the developer mass base, such as ByteDance 's volcano engine .

For the latter, open source and the developer community themselves are the best natural partners. The end customers, project optimization, iterations and future trends of

open source companies all directly form relationships with the developer community. Therefore, open source companies often have a strong demand for developer communities from the beginning. On the one hand, this demand is to build their own communities, and on the other hand, it is to strengthen brand recognition and influence the minds of developers in other third-party communities. There are countless open source companies represented, such as PingCAP, Taosi, Kyligence, etc.

2. From community to open source

1. The innate correlation between community and open source

The relationship between community and open source has been mentioned in detail in the previous article. Here we will discuss it in depth. The concept of

community should be earlier than open source, but the expansion of the community is inseparable from the rise of open source culture. This is easy to understand. When we look back at the development of the software development industry, we can clearly see the speed difference between the closed-source commercial software period and the free software and open source movement. The former is represented by office software, which changes every ten years. The latter, represented by open source software, has surpassed the innovation cycle of Moore's Law in the hardware industry in one fell swoop, making hardware updates a "toothpaste squeeze" style (of course, the slowdown in hardware innovation is not only related to software).

What role does the community play in this process? We can take a look at the development history of the Linux community.

Before Linux was developed, everyone believed that if the software was as complex as an operating system, it must have a carefully coordinated team, which should be small and interact closely. After Linux was developed, the entire industry was shocked by Linux's development model: cooperation only through the Internet, gathering a large number of community volunteers, quickly obtaining massive user feedback through weekly releases, and continuing to collaborate on development, optimization and release.

Then Linux became available, and the community model was established. To this day, open source software has devoured the entire Internet world.

2. Is open source a doctrine or a business?

Whether it is the open source movement or the free software movement before it, it is actually a story driven by emotions at the beginning. This sentiment comes from the "fundamentalism" of engineers, who believe that technology and openness can really change the world. This is indeed the case. Open source and openness have expanded the boundaries of the entire Internet world unprecedentedly. The concept of community has shortened the concept of physics. "Community over code" has become a principle that everyone believes in.

can be accompanied by "shadow" in recent years with the vigorous development of open source and community. Or it can be said that this topic is an eternal debate in the open source model - open source VS business.

I happened to host such a roundtable at the Huawei HC conference last year, and the debate topic was "The love and death between open source and business." The background of this debate is also based on this current situation-the conflict between cloud vendors and open source vendors has begun to become direct and fierce.

Such as MongoDB, Redis real-name diss against cloud vendors (AWS), such as Elasticsearch Changing the open source protocol to prevent cloud vendors from free prostitution, such as various cloud vendors being exposed for plagiarizing customer open source projects, etc. I even saw a special agreement a while ago, called the "Prohibition of Cloud Vendors Agreement" (I can't remember the English name).

A few years ago, I wrote an article in InfoQ called "Open source software is difficult to make money, so selling yourself as early as possible is the right way." What I lamented at the time was that open source companies were being acquired one after another or were in financial crisis. For example, Docker was downloaded more than 80 billion times, but the parent company almost died.

You have to admit that the concept of open source is great, but open source companies rarely live a prosperous life. Many people always like to use Red Hat to refute this point of view, but they forget that they can only cite the case of Red Hat as a support for this point of view.

Fortunately, there is only one Red Hat in the open source industry. Unfortunately, there is only one Red Hat in the open source industry.

But things are slowly changing. After all, the relationship between cloud vendors and open source companies is gradually moving towards cooperation or competing with .

This is the fact. Open source devours software, and cloud devours open source. To a certain extent, we can think that cloud is a higher-level business model. Whether you like it or not, and whether you deviate from your original intention or not, open source will eventually go towards the cloud.

3. Is commercialization good? Is it not good?

1. The voice of users sometimes does not necessarily support

. When a community or an open source project proposes to move toward commercialization, the voice of opposition will definitely not be small, and this voice must come from its own users.

I discovered this situation when I was at InfoQ:

The vast majority of Say No users may not be your loyal users. He just regards you as a free resource channel and takes all your efforts as a matter of course. The community should be open source, and the open source must be free. This is their simple logic.

To put it bluntly, the gangsters will not spend a penny on you, and they still think that they are your father.

This is the real situation of being a community - I think highly of you in your community, so don't be ignorant of praise. What's even more sad is that these users often have the most voices. If you don't have good psychological quality and judgment, you will start to doubt your life and suspect that you have fed the dog with your love.

Is their feedback the voice of the user? yes. Do they sound right? not necessarily.

When you try to meet the needs of these users, you will find that you may have affected more users. This is also why there is a "benevolent dictator" management model in open source community , and it is also the reason why members of the previous React project team said that major improvements or features cannot be disclosed in advance - you cannot satisfy everyone, but every move you make It will affect many people.

2. How difficult is it to not change your original intention?

I personally admire those who said from the beginning that I do community and open source to "generate electricity with love". But I personally doubt the quality of people who say these words all day long.

From my observation, people who start generating electricity for love end up starving to death. Those who hope that you can use your love to spread electricity may express a trace of condolences to you after discovering your death, and then continue to reach out to another place. The real users of

should be users who want you to survive and bring more value to the community. But sadly, there are too few such people.

This is the status quo.

Thinking about it from another angle, maybe this original intention itself is a mistake.In fact, many star open source projects I have seen started out as the author's personal solution to the problems he encountered every day. The project spread because the problems the author encountered became typical problems for a large group of users.

's original intention of doing open source is to solve their own problems, not to solve users' problems. After discovering the same pain point, often after experiencing early enthusiasm, as the project gradually grows, these authors will feel painful, and finally choose to withdraw and leave the project that made them famous everywhere.

Many domestic diodes, as soon as they saw that a certain community advertised, a certain project was marketed, and a certain service started to be paid, they began to gather together and shine:

Longevity, look at them starting to cut leeks. ! There is no sharing spirit of the Internet! Can the world be okay? Do you know what open source is? In the thinking of

diodes, open source and business are opposite, and sharing and marketing are opposite. For example, I used to run the InfoQ public account. As long as a bottom banner advertisement is added to a technology sharing article, the article is just for advertising. Rather than advertising, it is an add-on to the content and will not have any impact on viewing.

In fact, I also had such simple feelings at the beginning. This is probably the most common mistake for people who work in the content industry - false aloofness. I later slowly realized that business operations are the normal laws of the world. Those who ignore this law and ask others to generate electricity for love are moral kidnapping.

I have never denied the noble value of community and open source, but in real circumstances, having enough to eat seems to be a more realistic choice. After all, there are very few people like Richard Stallman who can earn enough money by working for two months a year and can spend the remaining ten months in the direction they like.

You can’t do it, and I can’t do it either.

Therefore, I admire those who use love to generate electricity, but I don’t want their story to be just a story of using love to generate electricity. I also don’t want our media and colleagues to publicize these people who use love to generate electricity. He should not be placed in an overly lofty position in this industry.

I hope that we can make a lot of contributions to the community and open source in this industry, and I also hope that we can gain our own material value and spiritual wealth from such work, that's all.

Author: Tang Xiaozhi; Public account: Xiaozhi’s Internet Observation (ID: hear_and_tell)

Original link: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/OrpNKRkqWsvkkiPmFK5okg

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