January 12th, 2007
The MVPs of Open Source
As the week ends, an important question.
Who are the MVPs of open source?
Are they the advocates? The maintainers? The stalwart community members? The CEOs of open source software companies?
Or is it someone else entirely?
I think it is. The MVP of open source, to me, is the person who can gather a number of open source tools together to create a site, a service, or a piece of corporate infrastructure that makes or saves big bucks.
It's not easy to be an MVP, because there is so much to keep up with. For instance, Amazon has a lot of neat new open source tools, but how do you integrate them into something valuable? And that's just one of many big-name companies that are now providing such tools, alongside Google, Sun, RedHat, IBM…yes, Virginia, even Microsoft.
How do you not only make sense of it, but make it useful? It is, as the President might say, hard work.
But it's really rewarding work. Companies like Nokia are ready to throw big money at people like this, as are increasing numbers of other big companies, big colleges, and big government institutions.
Or you can hang out your own shingle. Or go to work for a consultancy, and have them bring the clients to you.
The reason we're not reading so much about open source right now might just be this, the fact that it's a full employment economy. Who has time to rouse the rabble when you're cashing the big check?
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Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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