by Teresa Valdez Klein on May 3, 2007
Companies often seek to share their success and reduce tax liability by giving to or establishing charities. In addition to being good for the world, this well-established practice has a significant public relations upside.
Another permutation of this phenomenon is participation in open source communities. One of the real upsides of open source technology is flexibility. Businesses can get under the hood and make changes that advance their own interests. In some cases, companies make significant improvements in the technology itself.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that sharing these improvements would be to the company’s detriment. Why give competitors the keys to the proverbial kingdom? But in some cases, the upsides of community involvement far outweigh the potential boon to the competition.
As Jon Udell wrote a couple of years ago:
Nurturing the open source commons isn’t something you do for altruistic reasons. Enlightened self-interest is the real motivation. Like the Internet itself, the modern enterprise now relies on the fruits of the most successful open source projects. But the commoditization of operating systems, compilers, and servers only scratches the surface of what’s possible. All sorts of infrastructure software can benefit from the open source model. Business software, not all of which is necessarily proprietary, is ripe for commoditization too.
To advance these agendas, developers will have to learn to be good open source citizens. Yes, they’ll sometimes make errors in judgment, and they won’t always achieve the desired outcomes. But on the world stage, both failures and successes can loom larger than in the corporate cubicle. Developers who plug into the reputation-driven meritocracy of open source — while advancing the goals of your business — are a force to be reckoned with.
So how can companies determine whether they can benefit from sharing their modifications to an open source technology? Here are my rules of thumb:
- Is the project compatible with the main community’s efforts?
- Do your modifications make the software vastly more efficient, flexible or understandable?
- Are your modifications more than a simple customization for a particular internal need?
- Does your company want to recruit more talented geeks?
- Would this contribution benefit the community at large more than it would benefit your competition?
If you answered yes to all the above questions, chances are that your developments are worth sharing with the world. If you need an example of how this works, just look at Facebook’s involvement with the PHP community.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on April 9, 2007
When we rebuilt this site in Wordpress, one of our hot to-do items was to make it easy for the less HTML savvy members of our team to add bios and photos of our speakers. We accomplished this in three steps:
- Create a plugin that gives conference speakers an authorship role and has a custom template tag that will display only authors in that group.
- Create a standard
author.php file that displays author bio and photo information.
- Override the Wordpress function that requires an author to have posts attributed to to them in order to pass the query to the
author.php page.
Unfortunately, when you pass the author function in Wordpress and the author in question has no posts, Wordpress returns a 404 error. We originally solved the problem by adding the following PHP to our custom 404 page.
if( function_exists( 'bbs_is_author' ) && bbs_is_author()) {
include (TEMPLATEPATH.'/author.php');
} else {
This allowed the 404 page to pass the query along to the author.php page and display author information for authors (a.k.a. speakers) that have not written any posts in this system.
Unfortunately for us, Internet Explorer threw in a major hurdle. Unlike most browsers, Internet Explorer has friendly HTTP error messages that override our custom 404 page. Since IE users weren’t seeing our custom page, Wordpress didn’t know to pass the query to author.php page. Instead of the speaker information they requested, IE users were seeing a custom HTTP error message.
To rectify this, we modified the /wp-includes/classes.php file to pass the query to the author.php template rather than returning an HTTP error, regardless of whether the author had written any posts or not. If you are interested in learning more about the modification, you can e-mail me.
By the way, we’ll be covering more stuff like this at our next conference.
by Teresa Valdez Klein on October 10, 2006
We’re very happy to announce that just in time for the National Business Aviation Association Conference, we’ve soft-launched our newest editorial property: Big Business Jet.
The blog covers issues of importance to those who own private jets or are thinking about buying them. Obviously, that’s a pretty long-tail market. But it’s interesting stuff nonetheless. We’ll discuss everything from the materials used in jet completion to how CEO’s can demonstrate the value add of the corporate jet to shareholders.
Big Business Jet’s sponsor is Greenpoint Technologies (GTI). They’re the aviation industry’s most fabulous private jet completion center (read: they do the interiors), and they’re the wonderful people providing the Lear Jet for “Grapes on a Plane,” our post-conference Walla Walla wine flight.
The blog was built with Wordpress and the template was modified from an existing one by yours truly! All those hours of toil learning CSS and PHP and all manner of other geekery have actually gone into creating something cool. Hooray!
