Knowing Open Source community pitfalls

I came across this excellent blog post – “Recognizing and Avoiding Common Open Source Community Pitfalls“.  It’s very related to the short speech I gave recently over at 3rd Ubuntu / Fedora release party.  My angle was on how much good participating in an Open Source project could do to a college student.  I was talking more about how much practical stuff one could learn from existing projects – their tools, approaches, etc.

The blog post talks about roughly the same, but from a different perspective.  It’s more for those who are starting a new project, rather then joining the existing one.  There are plenty of ‘myths’ that go around about how is it is to do Open Source and how everyone can do it, and that all you need to succeed is to start.  That’s not so true, of course.  There is plenty of stuff to be learned and lots of work to be done.  If you are about to start your project or started one recently or just thinking about it, read the article.  It’s has roughly a paragraph about each of the following:

  1. Built it and they will come.
  2. Your community will help you build HARD DIFFICULT FEATURE X.
  3. Directional fallacies.
  4. Contributions are free.
  5. Profit models.
  6. Folks can understand your code.
  7. Documentation updates.
  8. Everyone using App X will give back freely and without your asking.
  9. Contributors are like coworkers.
  10. Resources grow on trees.
  11. Cross distribution support is easy.
  12. Users help users and it’s ok to just be a developer.
  13. Cross-project collaboration is easy.

Corporate slavery

I’ve heard an excellent phrase today – “corporate slavery“.  The moment I read, it made all the sense in the world.  A brief and clear description of something, straight to the point.  Here is how I heard it on Twitter:

Corporate slavery begins Thursday

But aparently the term is in use for a few years.  Here is an excellent photo set on Flickr.  And here is a gaping void back of a business card.

Perfect.

Migrating MS Dynamics CRM to SugarCRM

I’ve been a bit quiet for the last couple of month.  That’s because I was leading an ambicious project at my new job – migration of a Microsoft Dynamics CRM version 3 to SugarCRM Community Edition version 5.0.0.  There were only three people involved, non of us could afford to work full time on the project, and we only had three weeks to do it.

Read on for a story on why it took us longer, how we did, and if it was a success at all.

Continue reading Migrating MS Dynamics CRM to SugarCRM

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