Open minds and open source community

The last week of July was OSCON. Now that I’ve had a week off to think about all the amazing conversations I overheard and took part in, I want to share some of the ideas that I was hearing. I took Steve Yegge’s call to “work on important things” to heart in last week in Portland. I sought out hard conversations with the collection of open source users, developers and luminaries that attended OSCON. I started most of my hallway track sessions asking and thinking very broadly about our tag line, "from disruption to default."...

...If open source is now the default, if the audience is now much broader, then are we talking enough about the primary audience for open source tools, projects and products? Now our constituency is not all developer peers. We must challenge the idea that if someone really wants to use a piece of software, he or she will be willing to slog through half-written documentation, the actual code base and an unkind user interface....