You Know a Project is Big, When ...
I was minding my own business, having a bite to eat. Lasagne to die for in an arty part of town.
As I tend to do I asked them what they do for a living and the response was, "engineer" and "IT specialist". We talked about the 80s and where we'd studied our various trades.
Then the bombshell. "Have you seen Joomla!?", Vin the IT guys asked. I started smiling and we entered a world of PHP and Apache and what I'm sure the mechanical engineer amongst us thought was gobbledegook.
This Joomla love fest went on for about an hour. And then we progressed to Drupal and Moodle and other Open Source goodies. Then we talked about the fabulous Nooku Framework. Enough, I thought.
Feeling a bit guilty, I changed the subject to allow our engineer friend to talk about something we all could relate. He had an interest in vintage cars, which was fascinating; as he owns a collection of really, really old cars. We talked about special oils needed in sleeve valve engines and where to purchase such oils.
But eventually, Vin got back onto the subject of open source. And then came the million dollar question. "So how do you make any money out of Open Source," he asked.
My answer was simple. "Really, it's like this, in my case. I get to connect with some of the best coding minds in the PHP world, I get access to some of the best code around and if I had to develop that code, develop those relationships in the 'closed' source world, it would have cost me millions," I said.
"That doesn't really answer my question," he rightly countered.
We spoke some more about the size of the Joomla marketplace and the number of people who make a living from providing training, service and commercial addons and specialist consultancy.
"I think I get it," he said.
"As individuals you're all pretty good but as a collective, you're amazing!"
My thoughts entirely.
----
PS: The pub's website runs on WordPress
As I tend to do I asked them what they do for a living and the response was, "engineer" and "IT specialist". We talked about the 80s and where we'd studied our various trades.
Then the bombshell. "Have you seen Joomla!?", Vin the IT guys asked. I started smiling and we entered a world of PHP and Apache and what I'm sure the mechanical engineer amongst us thought was gobbledegook.
This Joomla love fest went on for about an hour. And then we progressed to Drupal and Moodle and other Open Source goodies. Then we talked about the fabulous Nooku Framework. Enough, I thought.
Feeling a bit guilty, I changed the subject to allow our engineer friend to talk about something we all could relate. He had an interest in vintage cars, which was fascinating; as he owns a collection of really, really old cars. We talked about special oils needed in sleeve valve engines and where to purchase such oils.
But eventually, Vin got back onto the subject of open source. And then came the million dollar question. "So how do you make any money out of Open Source," he asked.
My answer was simple. "Really, it's like this, in my case. I get to connect with some of the best coding minds in the PHP world, I get access to some of the best code around and if I had to develop that code, develop those relationships in the 'closed' source world, it would have cost me millions," I said.
"That doesn't really answer my question," he rightly countered.
We spoke some more about the size of the Joomla marketplace and the number of people who make a living from providing training, service and commercial addons and specialist consultancy.
"I think I get it," he said.
"As individuals you're all pretty good but as a collective, you're amazing!"
My thoughts entirely.
----
PS: The pub's website runs on WordPress
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Comment by philip Locke on December 11, 2009 at 11:00am -
Great story & cool ending Peter...
I'm going to use that phrase... "As individuals we're all pretty good but as a collective, we're amazing!"
brill
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