@bbcomCIO

Today I had a chance to read about a new book from Keith Curtis titled “After the Software Wars” which I promptly ordered from Amazon.  In Keith’s book he talks about his time at Microsoft and his movement toward open source and his migration to Linux.  This along with comments and his blog got me thinking about the impact to all things social.  Why is open source and Linux growing so much?  Why is open office finally becoming a competitor to MS Office?  Why do folks build things like Tweetdeck or Adium only to give them away?   What makes social (open source) software better than proprietary (closed) software?  To me the answer is dead simple; it’s all about Social interaction and communities.  Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, and many others are all growing at a rapid pace because they bring people together to share knowledge, stay informed and to feel like they are ultimately part of a community.  Open source software does the exact same thing by bringing developers and users together to support a community which is vested in a particular need fulfilled by the software they write and use.  One of the most prolific open source projects I’ve been around for years has been the Mambo / Joomla efforts and Wordpress

Joomla is a very good example of value software, software that fills a need in the world and it’s all for free.   Joomla has a very large community with hundreds of add-on’s to the stack created by other open source developers in it’s community.  Many of these plug-ins or add-on’s are free as well as some which offer commercial components.  The greats part about the software is the massive community behind it.

Wordpress would also be another great example of mass adoption and growth through social structure.  Wordpress 2.8 download counter show well over 900,000 downloads of the software. Google finds 5.8million sites containing the string”powered by Wordpress”;  Granted there will be duplicates listed and many that have never even been indexed but the fact remains it’s extensively supported by the masses.

In general the same factors that drive extreme growth in social media tools like Facebook and Twitter ultimately contribute to bigger causes such as Linux, Apache, Wordpress, Joomla and thousands of other software applications or perhaps we could call them social applications or social development teams.  Over the years I’ve worked in many teams in many capacities such as developer, designer, manager, team lead, etc and one thing that always made my job fun was the social aspects of working with a team.  Teams are powerhouses if they function properly, and teams are unstoppable if they all have the same goal.  I don’t know that I really have a point to this post and I’m more or less rambling on and on, but if I were to make a point it would be something like this.

• If you work along you really should on board with some team somewhere (opensource or other).
• If your on a team, be a team player with good listening skills and contribute to your team daily.
• If you’ve never worked in a team or you’ve never been a team player, it’s time to step it up because it will be the most rewarding function of your job no matter what your position.

Long story short (Be Social! and give back what you take and more.  Writing great software and giving it to the community is a “giving back” model and thousands will benifit from you and your teams efforts.