How to change the game by helping selfish people work together on your projects.

1. Revolutionary Open Source
Pieter Hintjens
ZeroMQ.org
How to change the game by
helping selfish people work
together on your projects

2. Why are we here...?

3. About you
● You're a programmer, organizer, leader
● You want to make successful software
● You want to work with other people
● You want to change the world
● You want to earn your living

4. About me
● “Pister Hinges”, origins unclear
● My code is crappy, my music is worse
● My businesses are lousy investments
● My protocols are clumsy (sorry for AMQP)
● I still can't believe O'Reilly published my book
● If failure is a university, I have many PhDs

5. Buy the book

6. Let me tell you a story...
● Closed source is Dead on Arrival
● The future belongs to open source
● To make open source, build communities
● There is a science to it: “Social Architecture”
● It can be very profitable

7. The pain, the pain!

8. Our industry sucks
● All our effort goes to making stuff
● Mostly stuff no-one really wants
● Missing every new opportunity
● Constant build-up of technical debt
● Complex, irrelevant, trash

9. We can dream...

10. Imagine a Perfect World
● Community does most of the work
● Mostly, things people really want
● Rapid colonization of new spaces
● Constant pruning of technical debt
● Simple, elegant, precious

11. But are we solving the right problems?

12. Why is accuracy so difficult?
● We love to make grand designs
● But problems are emergent
– I.e. we see them only when we get close
● Speculative design makes us blind
● Upfront structure makes us slow
● We attach to solutions, not problems

13. Perfection is possible

14. Simplicity Oriented Design
● Design by removing problems, not adding
features
● Simplicity beats functionality, every time
● Discover the core problems
● Solve them minimally
● Use that to discover next set of problems
● Aka “Drunken Stumble”

15. Why open source?
● Open source lets us make more accurate,
simpler software
● In a free & fair market, this will win
● Open source can be very profitable
– Profits are widely spread
● It's a social technology
– Not a business model

16. Why communities?
● No-one wants to live in Astana
● Community over code
● Community grows with the code
● We build the code
● We own it and look after it

17. Software is about people

18. Social Architecture
● “The art and science of growing an online
community”
● Cultural, political, or technological
● How we organize beats who we are
● Simplicity beats functionality
● Diversity beats education

19. Act normal, it's just a human

20. We're a funny animal
● We're lazy and stupid, so keep it simple
● We're selfish, so make it worth our while
● We like to conform, so give us good rules
● We're greedy, so make us compete
● We're fearful, so make it safe for us fail

21. We're a social species

22. How social is your code?
● An open source license is the contract on which
the community forms
● The license defines economics of behaviour
● A good contract dissolves conflict
● Type 1: BSD (MIT, X11, Apache, ...)
● Type 2: GPL (LGPL, AGPL, ...)

23. The essence of BSD
● The BSD license says, "Eat Me!"
● Some community building
● Significant leakage
● Mixable but forks are endothermic
● Ideal for large groups to dump code

24. The essence of GPL
● The GPL says, "Remix Me!"
● Strong community building
● Minimal leakage
● Remixable, forks are exothermic
● Ideal for the revolutionary

25. What's your Cost of Failure?

26. Start small, grow slowly
● Make seed product at own cost
● Do this in public view
● Pull in pioneer contributors
● Community designs next iteration
● Repeat ad infinitum

27. The community life cycle
● Pioneers, hunting for new stuff
● Leading edge, becoming specialists
● Early adopters, looking for profit
● Mass market, avoiding risk
● Late adopters, just keeping up

28. How sexy is your project?

29. Crazy and beautiful
● A crazy, impossible mission statement
● Has to speak to pioneers and leading edge
● Simple, elegant, brutally clean
● Has to be immediately useful and compelling
● You want love at first sight

30. Ease of access
● Remove all barriers to getting involved
● If you're not using GitHub, you should be
● Has to work for early adopters
● Aim for diversity of participants
● Origin, gender, age, experience

31. Cities built by people who never met

32. Stranger, meet Stranger
● Eliminate need for up-front agreement
● Invest in really good rules
● Apply the rules transparently and fairly
● Founder becomes enforcer of fair rules
● Not some special genius visionary

33. The C4 rulekit
● Plug and play rules for open source projects
● Focuses on scale of community
● Best practice from ZeroMQ community
● Codified for reuse by other projects
● ZeroMQ RFC 22 (rfc.zeromq.org/spec:22)

34. Infinite property
● Ideas are cheap and mean nothing
● Success comes from very hard work
● Participants should own their work
● Must be trivial to create new projects
● Scale by more projects, not bigger ones

35. Hi Daddy!

36. Care and feeding
● Communities are not 100% self-steering
● They need an authority (founders)
● They need living rules (lawyers)
● They need sound economics (backers)
● They need mediation (clients to experts)

37. Sorry, we're closed

38. Communities gone bad
● Bitter fights over vision and direction
● Politics instead of real work
● Endless talk of angels and unicorns
● Fragmentation and emotional pan
● Mental abuse and burnout

39. Open 24/7!

40. Communities done right
● Consensus emerges quietly in real time
● No politics, focus is on real work
● Remarkably little upfront discussion
● Emotional talk is the exception
● Participants come and go easily

41. Freedom needs security

42. Immunity from capture
● Juicy projects attract predators
● Founders, investors, or 3rd parties
● See this from the community's view
● Does the license make us immune?
● Can we choose another authority?

43. And does it pay the bills?

44. Making money from open source
● Forget dual licensing & support
– Eating the seeds for tomorrow's crops
● Bring the cost down to zero
● Destroy your competition
● Standardize to create new markets
● Sell new stuff into those markets

46. Hope you liked the story
● Read more at hintjens.com
● Buy the O'Reilly ZeroMQ book
Photos (c) 2013 Pieter Hintjens, shot in
New York city, Brussels, Vienna, a field in
France, and Berlin.