Getting customers involved in development
You are to be in all things regulated and governed…by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don’t walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls….This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste. (17)
Such was Mr. McChoakumchild’s doctrine in Mr. Gradgrind’s model school, as described by Charles Dickens in his masterful Hard Times.
Reading these words on my flight home to London, I couldn’t help but laugh. First, Charles Dickens is one of the five funniest people to have ever walked this earth. Second, because he actually captured much of the feeling that goes into proprietary software.
It is now established as Fact that enterprises don’t want to modify source code. They prefer to be mute consumers of others’ IP, chewing the cud that comes their way. No room for Fancy. For participating in the code to change its present or future direction. This is unassailable Truth.
Except that it’s not. True, that is. I used to think it was true, but that open source mattered, anyway, because the option of choice proved a useful surrogate for the exercise of choice. (I might not choose to view and modify source code, but the fact that you could would tend to improve the initial effort that went into the code, among other things.) I still think this is true.
But it’s not as all-encompassing as I had thought. Over the past ten months or so with Alfresco, it has surprised me again and again (I’m a slow learner) at how much our customers want to modify source code. Arguably, this is a short-term, anomalous condition because we’re dealing with early adopters. We count several of the world’s top-10 financial institutions as our customers, among others - the very type of customer that does want to actively manage code, and not passively accept off-the-shelf code. The kind that believes IT does matter.
But even among those that don’t want to grime up their hands with co-development of our software, it’s surprising how many want to play a strong, participatory role in our roadmap and the architecture that underlies it all. While in London this past week, I had lunch with one of our customers, and they kicked off the lunch with a 10-item “wish list” of features/improvements they’d like to see in Alfresco. No big deal, right? Microsoft must get feature requests all the time.
The difference here was that they also came to the table with development ideas of how to tweak our code to get there, and an appetite for involvement in the changes. In fact, we’re now hooking them up with one of our other customers that had some overlapping requests so that they can collaborate on our code. Try that with BMC, Oracle, SAP, etc. It just won’t happen.
I honestly didn’t expect this. I thought we had killed the pursuit of “fancy” in software. I assumed it was just the facts now; just whatever the vendor saw fit to drop on its customers. But there is room for fancy in software, and open source enables it. If you’re an open source entrepreneur, your goal must be to find ways to unleash Fancy in your customers. Don’t impose Fact on them. It didn’t work for Mr. Gradgrind’s pupils or children. It will no longer work for your customers.