It can be a story that starts with love, but it shouldn’t be a story that starts with love alone.

A story that begins in the community

Why have I been working in the community?

I’ve been working in the developer community for the past six years. During the six years from InfoQ to Nuggets, I have met many different developers and technical experts, and built deep friendships with marketing and public relations students from major companies. This is one of my most valuable assets in these years.

In February this year, I chose to resign naked. I should not have the confidence to resign naked when I am nearly 30 years old, still have the mortgage and rent, and still climb out of the bottomless pit of decoration. But I am so ordinary but confident, and this confidence comes from a knowledge:

It’s the best time for technology, it’s the best time to be a developer, and it’s the best time to be a developer relations/operations person.

In this context, I have witnessed the rapid growth of the Chinese developer community.

  • From the perspective of the third-party developer community, CSDN, InfoQ, 51CTO, Si Fu, Nuggets, these old or new developer communities are growing very fast, and the new community is even catching up.
  • From the perspective of the developer community built by the enterprise itself, whether it is the established community of Cloud community, Cloud Plus community, huawei developer community which has accumulated, or the new start of the Internet, the concept of community is more deeply rooted in people’s hearts.
  • From the perspective of open source and foundations, Linux Foundation and CNCF are expanding rapidly in China, and local Gitee, Mulan Protocol and Open Atom Open Source Foundation are also growing.

All these changes, and finally back to the above sentence – this is the best of technology. Fortunately, I am such a liberal arts student can also hitch a ride in this wave, to eat the so-called dividend of The Times.

The development of the community, is beyond the expectations of many people, also let a lot of people did not want to understand why to do the community of the Internet factory began to follow the trend of the community. But if I had to say what it’s like to be a community, I would have to say it in one sentence — generating electricity with love.

Why is the community suffering?

When I chose to change jobs in February, the advice I received from many people was that you need to be closest to your business (money). One of the reasons I changed jobs was because I felt I needed to make a change, even a transition.

I also is in this direction to find work, several cloud head manufacturer’s Marketing Department I have to contact, also got the offer, but in the end still chose to stay in the developer community, curved around the story behind it, for a while say not clear, maybe after two years I can comb more clearly their own this piece of work experience. But one thing is for sure, it’s really hard to be a community.

On the one hand, our type of talent is indeed favored by big factories, but on the other hand, we are often unable to accurately and convincingly explain our own value. This industry’s peers, rarely become enemies, more is to report together to warm the group, each other to complain (mutual) heartfelt (vomit) bowel (trough).

Given the current situation of “generating electricity with love” in the developer community, it is often difficult for us to convince the boss what business value can be generated behind this, not to mention how much budget can be obtained and how much performance can be achieved. KPI is very heavy and ROI is very low, so students who can do a good job in the operation of the developer community often write good PPT.

There are also various issues for the developer community itself. It’s hard to convince a boss of the value of developer operations, and how can a community boss convince his boss of the value of the developer community? I’ve seen too many neighborhoods where bosses have been replaced and entire neighborhoods have been cut down.

Most of the developer community is so far removed from the business that it is often positioned as a support department, perhaps dubbed a “middle office” department, but in reality a chore. The business may not necessarily recognize the value of the community, and the community itself is hard to get the business to support — you don’t make money and you’re so picky? Get out of here.

What kind of enterprise really needs a developer community?

In my opinion, there are really only two types of businesses that have a strong need for a developer community:

One is the head cloud vendor, the other is the open source enterprise.

For the former, the developer community is more about nurturing potential customers for cloud products. I read a report earlier that showed that technology purchasing decisions within the enterprise are starting to move from the bottom up, and if cloud vendors can build a good developer base, it will really help their cloud services transition. For smaller cloud vendors, vertical open source project communities make more sense, such as Qingyun’s KubeSphere. For start-up but ambitious cloud vendors, it’s still more about business transformation for head customers than the developer base, like Bytedance’s volcano engine.

For the latter, open source and the developer community themselves are a natural fit. The end customer, project optimization, iteration, and future direction of an open source enterprise are all directly related to the developer community. Therefore, open source companies often have a strong need for a developer community from the beginning, both to build their own community and to strengthen brand awareness and influence the minds of developers in other third-party communities. There are many open source companies represented, such as PingCAP, Tao, Kyligence, and so on.

From community to open source

The innate connection between community and open source

The relationship between community and open source has been mentioned in general, so let’s talk more about it here.

The concept of community predates open source, but it makes sense that the expansion of community is due to the rise of open source culture. When we look back at the development of the software development industry, the speed difference between the closed source commercial software era and the free software and open source movement is clear. The former is represented by office software, which changes every ten years. The latter, exemplified by open source software, has outpaced the Moore’s Law innovation cycle in the hardware industry, turning hardware updates into “toothpaste squeezings” (of course, it’s not just software that slows hardware innovation).

What role does the community play in this process? Look at the evolution of the Linux community. Before Linux was developed, everyone thought that if software was as complex as an operating system, it would require a well-coordinated team, small and closely interacting. After Linux was developed, the industry was shocked by the development model of Linux: collaboration on the Internet, aggregation of a large number of community volunteers, rapid access to massive user feedback through weekly releases, and continued collaborative development, optimization and rerelease.

Then Linux came along, and the community model took hold. To this day, open source software has devoured the Internet.

Is open source a doctrine or a business?

The open source movement, and the free software movement before it, was a sentimental story from the beginning. This sentiment comes from the “fundamentalism” of engineers, who believe that technology and openness can really change the world. Indeed, open source has extended the boundaries of the entire Internet world to an unprecedented extent. The concept of Community has shortened the concept of physics, and “Community over code” has become the norm.

However, in recent years, under the development of open source and community, there has been a “shadow” accompanying. Or, in other words, it’s a perennial open source debate — open source vs. business.

Last year, I hosted such a round table at huawei HC conference. The topic was “Open source and business love and kill each other”. The background to this debate is that the conflict between cloud vendors and open source vendors is becoming direct and intense.

For example, MongoDB and Redis have real-name DISs for CLOUD vendors (AWS). For example, Elasticsearch has changed the open source agreement to prevent cloud vendors from paying whos. For example, every cloud vendor has been exposed to plagiarism of customers’ open source projects. I even saw a special protocol a while ago called the “No Cloud Vendor Agreement”.

A few years ago I wrote an article on InfoQ called “Open Source software is hard to monetize, but selling it early is the right way.” At the time, I was bemoaning the fact that open source companies were being acquired or in financial trouble, like Docker, which was downloaded more than 80 billion times, and the parent company almost died.

You have to admit, open source is a great idea, but very few open source companies live very well. Many people like to point to Red Hat as an argument against this idea, but forget to point to Red Hat as a case in itself.

Fortunately for the open source industry, there is a Red Hat. Unfortunately, there is only one Red Hat.

But things are slowly changing. The relationship between cloud vendors and open source enterprises is gradually becoming cooperative or competitive after all.

The fact is, open source eats software, the cloud eats open source, and to some extent we can think of the cloud as a higher level business model. Whether we like it or not, we will not deviate from our original aspiration, but open source will eventually meet the cloud halfway.

Is commercialization good? Is bad?

The user’s voice may not always be right

When a community, or an open source project, proposes to go commercial, there will be a lot of opposition, and it will come from its own users.

This is what I found when I was at InfoQ:

The vast majority of Say No users are not necessarily your loyal users. He just sees you as a free resource channel and takes everything you give for granted. The community should be open source and open source must be free. This is their naive logic.

To put it bluntly, they don’t spend a dime on you and they think they’re your dad.

This is the real reality of being a community — I’m in your community and I think highly of you, so don’t be ungrateful. What’s more sad is that these users are often the most vocal. If you don’t have good psychological quality and judgment, you will start to doubt your life and doubt that you fed your dog with the electricity generated by your love.

Is their feedback the voice of the user? Is. Are their voices right? Not necessarily.

When you try to do something to satisfy these users’ point of view, you will find that you may be influencing more users. This is why the open source community has a “benevolent dictator” style of governance, and why the React team previously said you can’t reveal major improvements or features in advance — you can’t satisfy everyone, but what you do affects a lot of people.

How hard is it to stay the same?

I personally admire those who said from the beginning that I do community and open source to “generate electricity with love”. But I personally doubt the ingredients of people who say these things all the time.

From what I’ve seen, people who start out generating electricity for love end up starving to death. It is hoped that the outstretched party you have generated with love, upon discovering your death, may mourn you a little and then go on to another place to extend their hands.

A real user is someone who wants you to live and bring more value to the community. But sadly, there are too few of them.

This is the status quo.

Think about it from another Angle, maybe this initial intention itself is a mistake. In fact, many of the star open source projects I’ve seen started out as authors’ personal solutions to their daily problems, and spread because the author’s problems became typical of a large group of users.

They do open source to solve their own problems, not to solve their users’ problems. After discovering the same pain point, these writers often feel pain as the project grows stronger and stronger, and finally choose to withdraw and leave the project that makes him famous.

Many domestic diodes, as soon as they see the community advertising, the project marketing, the service began to pay, they began to shine together:

It’s the end of the world! Look at them cutting the leeks! There is no Internet spirit of sharing! Is the world going to be ok? Do you know what open source is?

In our minds, open source is opposed to commerce, and sharing and marketing are opposed. For example, I used to run the InfoQ public account. As long as I added banner ads at the bottom of a technology sharing article, the article was designed for advertising, not advertising, which is an addendum to the content.

In fact, I also have such a simple feelings at the beginning, which is the most likely to do the content of the people of the stink – false nobility. I have come to realize that business is the way the world works, and that anyone who ignores it and demands that love be generated is morally kidnapped.

I would never deny the lofty value of doing community and open source, but in a real world environment, eating your fill seems like a more realistic option. Few people like Richard Stallman earn enough money working for two months of the year to spend the remaining ten in their favorite direction.

Not for you, not for me.

So, I admire people who generate electricity for love, but I don’t want their story to be just a story of generating electricity with love, and I don’t want our media, our peers to hype these people who generate electricity with love. He should not be placed on too high a pedestal in this industry.

I hope we can contribute a lot to the community and open source in this industry, and I hope we can harvest our own material value and spiritual abundance in such work, that’s all.

About me

Former Editor-in-chief of InfoQ and now member of the Gold Climate team, I have a deep understanding of cloud computing and open source industry. You can also find me here.