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→Analysis on Each Speaker’s View on Open Source
What I find particularly interesting when comparing these two speakers on their opinion of open source is what I believe to be their principal motivations for being involved with open source communities: Mekki MacAulay was much more interested in the study and betterment of the open source community, while Emma Hodkin was far more interested in making a profit off the open source community, with a side focus on community development. While in some ways I found Emma’s perspective on open source topics to be somewhat less humble than Mekki’s, both were equally valid.
Mekki saw open source as a highly fascinating and potentially limitless concept, but also understood the potentially fickle nature of what was the driving force behind the open source movement: the community itself. He knew that there existed many open source projects that were never completed and subsequently abandoned, and that there are also many open source projects that flourished wonderfully, such as Linux. He sought to find out the “magic secret” that determined if an open source project was destined to succeed or destined to flounder, and was able to reach some simple preliminary conclusions: that there was definite barrier and difference in beliefs between the core group of developers and the outside contributors, and these differences provided a major impediment for the latter group to really become involved. That being said, it was also clear that he held a very optimistic view of the open source movement in general.
Emma had a much more pragmatic perspective on the open source movement, given her time spent “in the trenches”, so to speak. The fact that Drupal was an open source project really enabled her to become highly proficient with it; and with that proficiency she was able to forge an online presence and make a modest living for herself purely on it. Her experience with her community of students in her training program was especially telling and relatable to Mekki’s presentation; as described in his presentation, Emma encountered enabling and disabling practices between the two major groups in her class, the veteran group and the newbie group. The newbie group found the veteran group too intimidating, giving them feelings of inadequacy and making them question themselves whether or not they were truly capable of becoming good enough. In addition, her wildly variable financial performance within the open source community also told another very important point: that people aren’t always necessarily interested in contributing to open source projects purely for the sake of accomplishment or some sort of material reward, but rather contribute in order to join a community of like-minded individuals.
