When Stars Move

The last year has seen both an inflow and outflow of Open Source Software talent in and around the tidewaters of Silicon Valley. Guido van Rossum, author of Python, arrived. But coming to ground zero of OSS, he doesn’t work full time on his creation! Apparently there isn’t enough money to sustain his family and expenses by working solely on Python projects.

Gone are the days when every dotcom competed to pull in name-brand developers and other open source stars. Attractive startups pulled in Rasmus Lerdorf of PHP and many others. Even Linus was offered his job in 1997 at Transmeta as the hardware venture strove to bolster media publicity before its IPO. Today different skills are needed for leadership in the technology startup game in an economic climate that is just beginning to improve again.

There has been a loss of over 200,000 high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley since the dotcom bust. Even among the majority of technical workers who are not great luminaries, the outflow of talent has been palpable and painful. Many companies, instead of trying attract talent to Silicon Valley are going to where the talent already exists and is, bottom line, cheaper. Despite political sensitivities, outsourcing and offshoring are inevitable in all technology industries including the Open Source Software product and project space.

Now the outflow of talent includes none other than Linus himself. He recently announced he is escaping the craziness of Silicon Valley to move up the coast to Portland, Oregon. Portland is a cheaper, lower speed but still trendy destination. His employer, OSDL, is located there. Portland, which gets lots of rain and is affectionately called “Silicon Forest”, is home to major Intel research labs as well as other high-tech ventures. Plus, it will be hosting this year’s O’Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON 2004).

Linus avers that he is happy to grow webbed feet to be able to survive in Portland’s temperate rain forest and, besides, it does not matter where he is physically located to discharge his Linux stewardship responsibilities. While this may be true on a day-to-day basis, Linus’ view may not reflect the ground realities of the infrastructure required to provide him with the top tools he needs and the benefit of access and influence that’s amplified by the strong organization he is intimately a part of.

Tim O’Reilly likes to say that the Open Source Community was built by the brilliant innovation of individual visionaries. In the long run, however, this may not be how the community is sustained. Many of yesterday’s efforts and leaders are today coalescing around highly organized resources such as labs, multi-national corporations, government projects, and educational institutions. Even Linus today is supported by a well endowed lab with global sponsorship and reach.

For this reason, the outflow of OSS stardom from Silicon Valley will not diminish the luminance of OSS. In fact there is a kind of democratization to the spread of talent and resources into many Silicon Valleys, Alleys, Forests, Prairies, and Plateaus. Talent can be nurtured more widely, indeed globally. Everywhere the best of the talent can be harvested.

As the OSS universe matures, it is clear that progress proceeds by a loosely coupled, global mix of individual talent and well-resourced organizations. In today’s virtual communities, the talent may be observed right in front of you on your Web browser, but sustained access to and utilization of that talent will inevitably require, and at the same time foster deeper, wider and more distributed OSS resources. The spread of talent in all directions, whether to Silicon Valley, Portland, Bangalore, or Singapore ultimately reinforces the foundational stability and access to resources of OSS.