Beautiful Teams

Chapter 8. Inner Source

Auke Jilderda

It has always amazed us that some of the largest, most successful open source projects like Linux, Firefox, and Apache release high-quality software under conditions that would cause most teams to crash and burn. They have large (sometimes huge) teams that are distributed all over the world and that rely on a lot of the work to be done by unpaid or undercompensated volunteers: programmers, testers, and other team members. That's why we wanted to talk to Auke Jilderda, who's had a lot of success studying how those open source teams work and applying their lessons to corporate projects.

Jenny: You've spent a lot of time looking at how open source projects work, and how companies can learn from that. How did that start?

Auke: I started work in the research department at a large European multinational. I was working at one of the laboratories in the software architecture group, where most were focused on the architectural aspects of building software.

I recognized that there are a number of spectacular successes in open source but also a huge number of complete failures. For instance, Apache beat the big players on the web server market—IBM and Microsoft—despite those trying very hard to win at the time, in an effort to gain control of the web standards. At the same time, the vast majority of projects on open source development sites are dormant, one person efforts that haven't gone anywhere. In other words, there is something to learn from ...