They’re even talking about “participative communities” over in the .NET universe as the alt.net movement (insurgency?) gains momentum. Martin Fowler’s Bliki summarized the AltNetConf in Austin, TX a few weeks ago. He describes key participants as “a group of long-time users of Microsoft technologies who feel that their development philosophy has been getting out of sync with the perceived orthodoxy from Redmond.”

Highlighting their shared approach to software development methods (think agile), Fowler addresses a key topic — the relationship between software providers and software users:

“A participative community is different, they don’t just want the vendor to listen and provide suitable products - they want to participate in the development of new products. It’s just such a participative community that’s taken the initiative in the Java world. JUnit, IBatis, Spring, Hibernate et al didn’t come out of the vendors, but were developed by “customers”. One of the things about the nature of the software industry is that many customers are every bit as capable of producing vital products as vendor companies, especially when combined with the community and ethos of open source.

The great question ahead for Microsoft is how to engage with a participative and opinionated community like this. Treating such a group as an opponent will result in the loss of valuable products, and more importantly the capable people connected with them. Engaging with a community like this brings great opportunity. I would argue that the participative community around enterprise Java has saved the enterprise Java platform. A big challenge for Microsoft in all this is that this means finding a way to accommodate with open source development. …

One other issue in a community like this is that it’s a community that doesn’t equate criticism with animosity. Many vendors suffer from the belief that anyone who criticizes them is their enemy. In truth often your friends are at their most valuable when they are critical.”

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft can be “open” enough to accommodate the alt.net movement. Given the caliber of the people involved, Microsoft’s loss would be open source’s gain.
 

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This entry was posted by Ryck on Thursday, November 1st, 2007 at 11:43 pm and is filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.