This post was originally going to be titled “why open source”, but after I received my feedback following my talks at Penn State MacAdmins, I decided to expand it a little.
Ever since I thought I had something that someone else my be interested in hearing, I’ve wanted to give back to the Mac admin community. As someone who’s worked in the commercial sector, this might seen a bit strange. I mean, we’re basically giving away what makes pebble.it money, right?
To a certain extent, that’s 100% correct. The vast majority of what we’ve done over the past few years is open source - lunacy!
One developer or a hundred?
Usually when I make a script or some other tool, it’s because I have a need for it. That means I’m going to have to write it anyway. Then OS X Spinal Tap 10.11 comes out and breaks my script. I might not find out until I actually come to deploy the OS if it’s working. When I open source it, I’ve hopefully got many people using it and willing to file bug reports. If I’m really lucky I might have someone willing and able to contribute code to fix it.
Something that might have taken me weeks to get around to fixing can be sorted in days.
The most important reason of all
I doubt anyone reading this has never been helped by anyone. Whether it’s blog posts from the likes of Rich Trouton, looking at code by Greg Neagle, or one of the many posts on Mac Enterprise, there are scores of people offering their knowledge and expertise, asking for nothing in return.
Sharing helps our community thrive; without people able to support OS X in the enterprise, OS X won’t be deployed to the enterprise. In short, it’s the right thing to do.
