ZeroMQ

Stranger, Meet Stranger

How much up-front agreement do two people need to work together on something? In most organizations, a lot. But you can bring this cost down to near zero, and then people can collaborate without having ever met, done a phone conference, or had a meeting or business trip to discuss Roles and Responsibilities over way too many bottles of cheap Korean rice wine.

You need well-written rules that are designed by cynical people like me to force strangers into mutually beneficial collaboration instead of conflict. The GPL is a good start. GitHub and its fork/merge strategy is a good follow-up. And then you want something like our C4 rulebook to control how work actually happens.

C4 (which I now use for every new open source project) has detailed and tested answers to a lot of common mistakes people make, such as the sin of working offline in a corner with others “because it’s faster.” Transparency is essential to get trust, which is essential to get scale. By forcing every single change through a single transparent process, you build real trust in the results.

Another cardinal sin that many open source developers make is to place themselves above others. “I founded this project, thus my intellect is superior to that of others.” It’s not just immodest and rude, and usually inaccurate; it’s also poor business. The rules must apply equally to everyone, without distinction. You are part of the community. Your job, as founder of a project, is not to impose ...