Interviewee: Matt Mullenwegr

In this interview we talk with Matt Mullenweg of WordPress and Automattic. In specific, we talk about:

• Successfully making the culture shift when an open source project is acquired by a corporation
• Scaling skills and physical resources effectively as a project gets larger
• Handling comment spam in blogging environments
• Achieving usability for a technically diverse user base
• The value of an open source community in recruiting people
• The place of blogs in a world of open-ended communication options

Sean Campbell: Matt, could you start us off by introducing yourself?

Matt Mullenweg: Sure. I am a co-founder of WordPress, and I currently lead the development effort. WordPress is open source publishing software that started out as blogging software, but is now starting to be used as a content management system as well.

Sean: There’s been a lot of talk lately about Red Hat’s business model; a lot of people hold them up as the gold standard for a successful model of growth and profitability using open source. There are also rumors that IBM’s going to acquire Sun, and of course, Sun recently acquired MySQL.

Against that backdrop, what can you say about the right way for a corporation to acquire an open source company, especially in terms of getting people to stay with the effort after the acquisition is complete?

Matt: I think that you have to be very cognizant of the existing culture and, ideally, try to change stuff as little as possible. For example, my understanding of MySQL is that 70 percent of people work from home. Trying to change that could be very disruptive.

There’s synthesis with all acquisitions, and it’s important not to break what’s working well. Google kept YouTube with separate offices–basically as a separate operation–because they had already done super well. In general, I think it’s best to change as little possible when you acquire something, particularly if it’s open source.

Sean: Are there areas you think are safer to change than others? It seems that large organizations are particularly likely to want to make changes, for better or worse.

One area where it seems there might be an opportunity there is in the case of a small up-and-coming project that may not have the ideal depth of hardware and back-end resources. How would an acquiring company find the right balance between showering them with unneeded technology, versus dedicating additional, bright people to grow the development side of the project?

In other words, how does the company know how to help, beyond just leaving them more or less alone?

Matt: Depending on how it’s done, making more resources available could be great, although I’d be hesitant about giving them to people directly. Still, having more headcount and infrastructure can spur development.

I don’t know if the guidance here is all that specific to open source, actually, versus general acquisitions, since I think that in the software world, the expectations are the same. In either case, whatever you’re hoping to change or integrate should be one of the first conversations you ever have. That helps minimize the degree to which people feel things like, “Ah, crap. We’ve been acquired, and now I’ve got to figure out their stupid user system.”

If you talk about those issues from the beginning, you avoid making people feel blindsided. There will be places where changes have to happen, but if you say at the outset, “OK, we have 100 million users; you have two. It makes sense to integrate those systems,” then you can avoid unnecessary surprises.

A big part of it is that companies really need to think about how easy it is for people to do things on a day-to-day basis. How easy or hard is it to buy a computer, go to a conference, get a new email account, or bring a new server online? None of those issues really fit into a normal design review process or anything like that, but they’re stuff that people deal with every day.

Little annoyances add up cumulatively, and people’s general job satisfaction can depend completely on whether they have to deal with 1,000 annoyances and huge levels of bureaucracy to do basic, simple things. Particularly if they were very simple before the acquisition and difficult afterward, people will quickly get frustrated.

Sean: When WordPress was growing, how did you scale up the IT expertise you needed alongside the core development skill set? It must have been a complicated transition to go from a strictly developer mindset to managing the large number of servers you have now, and obviously, you had to tackle issues about smart growth, reliability, and uptime, which I assume were not core considerations at the beginning of the project.

Matt: Originally, I and a few of the other early developers were doing all the systems administration, just because we had to. We were lucky in the sense that, a few months into it, we started to get help from a fellow named Barry, who had more of a real systems administration background than we did.

He’s very good about making things super reliable and fast, although he didn’t initially have experience with systems at that large a scale. It was certainly a learning process along the way, but we all agreed from the beginning on commonsense goals like wanting the site to be fast, available, and super reliable, so that was a good foundation.

Actually, to this day, Barry is still our only full time systems guy.

Scott Swigart: Of course, not every open source project is backed by a company that offers hosting as WordPress does. As the company offered hosting of WordPress blogs and that took off and became popular, how much did that drive the development to make sure that this open source project was really being built in such a way that would facilitate it scaling? And how much do you think the decision to host has had to do with the overall success of the project?

Matt: I think hosting could have had a negative impact. We made the decision very early on that the structure of WordPress.com would be basically identical to WordPress.org, which honestly made it more difficult in terms of scaling and a few other things.

At the same time, though, it ensures that recruitment and scalability and everything else that was done to WordPress.com has fed directly into the back-end open source project.

I don’t know how much of an impact hosting has actually had on WordPress’s success, simply because 99.99% of blogs never reach the point where the level of traffic is an issue. On the usability and interface side, it has provided more flexibility, because we are able to test things out in a very time-independent way.

We can do things as a plugin for .org or .com and put it out there and let the market decide whether it is something worth having or not.

Sean: From some of the interviews I have seen, it sounds like you’ve had kind of an evolving relationship with comment spam. Obviously, the problem isn’t going to go away soon. What do you think is the next set of punches and counter-punches in that area?

What do you think the next level is that those folks might try, and looking ahead, how might you try to keep that problem at a low roar or squelch it?

Matt: Luckily, our anti-spam product, Akismet, has remained at a very high level of accuracy. I think the thing that is starting to impact us more is that the spam is being made to look more like human comments. Entries may comment on previous comments, and in some cases, spammers actually pay people to write the entries in.

People don’t realize the extent of this sort of thing. The spammer may leave a compliment on the blog, and the blog owner is flattered. They may notice that the URL looks a little weird, but that seems secondary to them.

Unfortunately, if you are going to keep spam off your blog, you have to be a little bit paranoid and really check all the URLs and everything.

Sean: What’s the next technological piece you are thinking of adding to deal with the spam that really doesn’t look at all like spam, like when you get a comment that says, “I loved your blog,” and the URL is Bank of America without the F? What’s the next logical move in that area?

Matt: We’re not really planning any major technological changes right now, because we’re catching that stuff. The biggest thing needed is not technological, but educational– just informing people, and educating them about what really is spam or not.

Sean: I have to wonder how solvable some of these problems are. Blogging has progressed from more technical people to less technical people, and that’s what you want with technology, right? You want it to become mainstream and pervasive and really a new paradigm.

You want it to be approachable by people who aren’t technical, because they have interesting things to say, too. At the same time, they are inherently not going to understand some of this stuff. So, how do you guys think about that balance?

Matt: We try to treat our users as much as possible like they’re intelligent people, and we don’t try to dumb it down. Our approach is to provide the opportunity for people to enter into it and learn from the system, and they really do.

On one hand, there is the impulse to make everything super simple, to ensure it’s accessible. On the other hand, you have to consider something like World of Warcraft, which is an incredibly complex system that has tens of millions of people paying $10 a month to use it.

Part of the secret there, of course, is that it’s fun, and I think anything that we can make fun will allow people to have a true learning process.

Sean: A related issue is that it doesn’t have to be for everybody–you don’t have to try to make it one size fits all. I’m sure there are people who can’t figure out World of Warcraft, but many of them don’t particularly have any interest in it. That’s OK–it can still be a massive success.

Matt: I think if you try to build for everyone, you are pleasing no one.

Sean: Usability-wise, WordPress has always been great. I don’t claim to know every single widget and option, but I have a reasonably solid understanding of it, and it has never been painful to figure those things out. You couldn’t say that necessarily about a lot of other open source software.

How are you guys structured internally to maintain high usability? Typically, that gets difficult as a project grows, unless somebody’s acting as a benevolent dictator.

Do you have a final launch authority on usability, or do you test it on user groups, or something else?

Matt: One of the most important things is that everyone developing the software uses it every day. That sounds basic, but I think most software actually doesn’t have that. If you’re developing a word processor, you need to write something in your word processor every day, and if you’re developing blogging software, you need to blog every day.

You also have to realize that for some software, that’s really hard. If you’re developing a Sarbanes-Oxley management system, most of your staff are not going to need that at a personal level.

Sean: [laughs] Right. Not all your developers are bankers in their evening jobs, so they’re not going to be able to understand all the ramifications of some UI change.

Matt: Still, in consumer software, that’s typically completely possible, because every developer can also be a beta tester, and I think that’s really important. The output of that is that you get everyone thinking from a user point of view, versus an implementation point of view.

Part of my job is also finding the best people in the world, who can give some really powerful input into what we’re doing. But more, I think you just need to have sort of a set of shared principles that everyone agrees with and everyone can believe in, like a philosophy.

One of our philosophies is to include as few options as possible. We try to make things work by default and not burden the user with lots of options. That translates into everyone thinking about things in a slightly different way, and being able to articulate those things into the minds of every single person adds a bit of nuance that would be lost if we had separate people who did development and others who did design.

Sean: I see companies that build “line of business” apps trying to add more and more design, in fits and starts, to their development process. You’ve got trends like consumerization of IT, and you’ve got a workforce that expects apps to have a certain fidelity. If your users walk in and see some ugly, heinous line of business accounting or HR or travel app that’s been around for 10 years, they’ll say, “You’re going to make me use this?”

In terms of hiring the right people, do you feel that open source, in general, makes it easier to identify candidates that rise above the middle and get to the top? In corporate development, you can say you worked on a project, but it can be difficult to communicate what you did and to prove it and to really show a long stream of communications in solving problems and interacting with a community.

It would seem like that makes the job of hiring easier than if you were trying to draw on a team of closed source candidates for a closed source project.

Matt: I agree.

Scott: What are some examples of how that has panned out for you?

Matt: When you’re doing any sort of hiring, if it’s a person you’ve worked with in the past, you know how they’re going to operate in difficult situations. In reality, it’s more important than anything on a resume to know how they’re going to interact with other people and the product, day to day.

Open source allows anyone to jump into that process, without any gatekeepers, and the pool of people is often broader and deeper. There’ll be people in Uruguay or Brazil or Mexico or some place in Europe, and when it comes time to hire, you’re like, “Well, so and so would be perfect.”

And it’s a complete meritocracy.

Sean: In a commercial environment, there’s often the supposition that if somebody comes from XYZ company, they are used to a certain corporate culture, and that often becomes a consideration in the hiring process.

When an open source team is hiring people from other open source teams, does a similar sort of interplay tend to happen? For example, does it come into play when you’re looking at a given effort, how that project tends to organize its discussion, its voting process, and its way of arbitrating between usability versus technological issues?

Matt: Absolutely. For example, we’ve worked with some people who came from the Mozilla project, and they have a certain way of doing things that involves a little more bureaucracy than most open source projects, just as a result of their size.

A lot of factors like that contribute to someone’s background, although there’s never a direct correlation that tells you that, if someone worked on X, they’ll be perfect (or not) for Y. There’s always a learning process as they’re becoming part of the culture, so there’s no secret sauce there.

Sean: Considering various ways of communicating on a computer, there’s blogging, and Twittering, and so on. It seems that the average user probably has a limited number of ways they want to go about communicating on a given day, and most of them adopt just a few; e-mail and IM are the other obvious examples.

Do you see any ripples in the future, where people might be getting closer to moving away from blogging toward something else? Maybe toward something that’s more rapid fire, or less asynchronous?

I’m not trying to position Twitter or any other specific option in that place, because I see them as more complementary than anything else. At the same time, I also see that with all the different options people have for communication, eventually Joe User will get saturated and be forced to pick just a couple.

Matt: I think that complementariness is foremost right now. Twitter and WordPress aren’t super tied together, but you can imagine that every blog post I do should be posted to Twitter, and probably some of my Twitters should go back inside my blogs.

The reason I personally like blogs is because they serve as the best online profile I could create. More than my Facebook, my Friendster profile, or any of these others, my blog is really a representation of me. Because I have complete control over it, it’s a bit of me. By now, it contains seven or eight years of history of things I was interested in, including photos and all kinds of things.

As I interact with things like Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, I find that I want to aggregate them into my blog, because that is sort of like my home base. I think that people online will always need a home base like that, although the other things that they interact with will be constantly changing.

I did not see YouTube coming at all, but it’s hard to imagine something that has had a bigger cultural impact in the past couple of years, and it’s another way that people now share, aggregate, and interact with one another.

Sean: Blogs have very rapidly gone from being a new thing that geeks did, to spreading out to non-technical people, to really having an impact on politics, policy, and news. In some ways, people probably view blogs as being kind of mundane.

You don’t run into a blog and say, “Oh, what’s that?” What still surprises you? What have you run into recently around the notion of blogs that is fresh and new, and catches your attention?

Matt: I am always fascinated by things that capture peoples’ hearts and minds. In the past couple of years, Twitter has captured a huge amount of press, and I think a good chunk of peoples’ thoughts, but if you compare it to Facebook or YouTube, it’s a drop in the bucket.

When you can make the interactions with the application or website into kind of a game, that’s when I think people start to really make it part of their everyday life. If you’re a part of the game, you’re also facilitating communication or imparting information, or people are learning or reading, and that can be very rewarding.

Facebook in particular has incorporated game-like elements to the nth degree. It is literally addictive. I have peers–particularly those who are still in college–who spend hours per day on it. How is that possible? It’s ridiculous.

Sean: Right. It’s not a game in the World of Warcraft sense, but it has a similar semantic feel that makes you want to play along. You get drawn into the interface, and even if the interface has a hiccup or two, you just drive around the pothole, because you want to play the game.

Scott: That is what we need to solve the recession–we just need a game-based economy.

[laughter]

Sean: Well, I’m glad we solved the economic crisis. This conversation has been time well spent.

Matt: Thanks. I enjoyed talking to you both.

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Interviewee: Adam Williamson

In this interview we talk with Adam. In specific, we talk about:

• What’s new in the latest Mandriva release
• Relating directly to the users instead of the developer community
• Differences between user priorities and developer priorities
• Deciding what should be included in the distribution
• What will become of the “year of the Linux desktop” idea?
• The future of open versus closed development

Sean Campbell: Adam, please give us some background on you and on Mandriva.

Adam Williamson: Sure. I’m the community manager for Mandriva, which is my most important role with the project, but like everyone else here, I do about twenty other things as well.

I’m also the bug tester, I maintain several packages, and I do a lot of public relations community announcement stuff. Mandriva is one of the leading Linux distributions. It’s been around since 1998, so it’s one of the older ones. It primarily has a desktop focus, and we’ve got a strong international community.

Sean: Since you just released the most recent version, walk us through the most significant features you added to that release.

Adam: The biggest new feature is that we are using KDE 4 as the default desktop. We had a sort of testing version of it in previous releases, but it was more for playing around with than really using. For this version, KDE 4 is the default, so when users install, that’s what they will be using, out of the box.

That change brings a lot of great new features with it, like the plasmoids, the new file manager, Phonon, and all that good stuff. We’ve also overhauled our tools and our install. We’ve given them a completely new appearance, so they look nice and it also improves the ergonomics a bit.

Aside from that, there’s a whole laundry list of stuff. We’ve got GNOME 2.24, as well as LXDE, which is good for netbooks. We have really good netbook support in this release–we test things on the Eee PC, and we also have it working on the Aspire and the Wind. We’ve improved the boot speed quite a lot.

Something that I personally am involved in is support for working with mobile devices: Windows Mobile, BlackBerrys, and things like that, and I’m pretty sure we have the best support for that out of any distribution.

Sean: I remember from our previous conversation that you guys have invested a lot of time in mobile device support. Looking back historically, what particular challenges have you overcome in trying to integrate mobile device support?

Adam: That’s actually my stuff. It started with the 2008 Spring release. One of the nice things about Mandriva is that it’s a very flexible system to work with. About two weeks before 2008 Spring came out, my partner–who works for a cell phone store–brought home a Windows mobile phone. I plugged it in and couldn’t do anything with it. I couldn’t even look at what was on there, let alone start synchronizing it, so I decided to make it work.

There’s a framework called SynCE for Windows mobile devices that plugs into a thing called OpenSync, and then you need an OpenSync front end to actually synchronize anything. It’s a very complicated process, and at the time of 2008 Spring it was even messier because lots of this stuff was broken.

It involved getting OpenSync, SynCE, and a front end called Kitchen Sync all packaged up properly, and patched and working together. It was a matter of little bits of talking to various projects and getting patches and working out a couple of things that I had to fix myself.

I also had a BlackBerry lying around, so I got on a bit of a roll and I thought, well, I’ll get BlackBerrys working as well. It’s one of those little inspiration challenges, and the interesting thing is that it’s something that probably real people do more than distribution people. Your average distro guy probably doesn’t use something like a BlackBerry or a Windows Mobile phone; it’s not his work system.

But in my role of community manager, I know there are quite a lot of people out there who would find this quite useful. It’s kind of something that falls between the cracks for a lot of distribution developers, because they just don’t work that way.

Sean: Given that you’re the community manager, what are the features in Mandriva that you feel the development community rallies around–and you don’t really have to work hard to get them to throw their effort in–and what are the features that you have to sometimes say, “Hey, I need you guys to help out over here?”

Adam: In most companies, the community manager talks mostly with the development community, but I actually work mostly with the user community.

Our development is very collaborative between the community and the internal developers. It’s all done in Cooker, which is the open development distro; we don’t do anything behind closed doors. We don’t really have to drive anyone to work on any particular area, because we find that people tend to work on areas that are useful.

We don’t have a community manager in the sense of someone who directs the development community and says please do this, please do that. We’ve been doing community development for a long time, practically since we started, and we’ve got a lot of long-term contributors who understand what needs to be done. It’s really not something that we’ve had a problem with.

Sean: Given that you’re more focused on the user community, what kinds of things has the user community asked for that you realize are going to take longer to implement than the community thinks? This issue seems to come up a lot, when users are calling for a specific feature, but since they’re not software developers, they may not really understand that what seems like a simple request might take much longer than they think.

Adam: I know exactly the situation you mean–they’re asking for the moon on a plate, but they don’t realize it. The classic example is someone coming into the forums after they try out Mandriva, and it’s the first Linux they’ve tried.

They say “well, why doesn’t my wireless card work?” and “why doesn’t this USB Bluetooth adapter work?” and “Linux is just rubbish! Why doesn’t all this stuff just work straight away?”

I find all that a bit funny, because I came in around 2001, when you’d have the exact same tenor of post on mailing lists or Usenet at the time. The difference is that back then, it would be, “Why doesn’t my network card work? Why doesn’t my graphics card work?” We’ve gone from broken graphics cards to broken Bluetooth in five years, which I think is pretty good, actually.

[laughter]

Adam: But the thing is, problems are getting smaller and smaller as we go along. So I sort of view this as an encouraging message of progress more than anything else. They complain about things that don’t work and as you say, it’s not their fault, because you have to have quite a bit of technical knowledge to understand why it is hard to implement certain things.

Scott Swigart: You mentioned that you worked on the mobile stuff because it was interesting to you, but you also suggested that isn’t necessarily the way a lot of the Mandriva developers work. They might not have experienced the same pain as some of the other users. What do you think are some of the typical places where the itch that a user has is different than the itch a distro developer has?

Adam: One straightforward example is anything you can do from a console. I work remotely, and I’m more graphical than most of the technical guys on the distribution because I’m sort of moonlighting–like, I work in gedit. So when I go to the Paris office, I see a developer’s desk and it’s ten xterm instances, and you can’t see anything graphical underneath that.

I have another good personal example, even though it’s been superseded a bit because Kate and GNOME can both do it. But back around two or three distributions ago, I noticed that there wasn’t any easy way to launch a graphical text editor as root.

You could just open a file and edit it. You know developers are not going to notice this, because they just do things from a console. It’s natural for them just to go “su vi” or something.

So I came up with just a little menu entry that used consolehelper to launch gedit as root. A lot of people found this really, really useful. I do various things writing documentation on the Wiki. I had to write down “open a console, type su, enter your root password, and then type kwrite or gedit filename,” and I thought that was a bit silly.

Why can’t I just click on an icon and open a root text editor? A developer wouldn’t even notice a little thing like that or consider it necessary, but to users, it’s quite a big deal.

Scott: I got my start on Unix systems, so I’m used to the ten xterm windows, and I remember kind of feeling like GUIs were garbage to some degree. The command line was fast, and you could do exactly what you wanted.

You could pipe stuff to grep, you could filter it, and it was just way faster than clicking a million text boxes to say what you wanted. But that’s fundamentally different from what users have been conditioned to expect with Macs and Windows and that kind of stuff.

Talk a bit about the evolution of developers coming to terms with understanding the idea that users just aren’t going to be interested in learning a lot of command lines to be productive and happy on Linux.

Adam: That’s an interesting area, and it’s something that Mandriva has been on top of for a long time. If you go back a ways to the Mandrake days around 2000 to 2003, we were the distribution that did this kind of thing.

Mandrake was the big one, because we had the Mandrake Control Center, the Mandriva Control Center, which is a big graphical thing that lets you configure a lot of the system. That has always been one of Mandriva’s strong points, but it’s definitely evolved over time.

It used to be that a lot of new Linux users who were not top-level technical gurus wanted to open up a console and learn how to pipe stuff to grep and so on.

Now, a lot more of the new users are people who genuinely don’t want to learn that stuff, and it’s possible to run a modern distribution–not just Mandriva but a bunch of others as well–without ever having to do that kind of stuff.

That is definitely a development within the last two or three years. I think it’s fair to give Ubuntu a bit of credit for that, because they put out a graphical product that you install and then feel like you can actually use it as a graphical modern everyday desktop.

Prior to 2005, a lot of people tried Linux for a day or two and quickly realized that they weren’t actually going to be able to use it without learning a whole bunch of technical console crap. They saw that, and they rejected it.

Scott: Right. And Shuttleworth has always been happy to don his flame retardant suit and make himself absolute flame bait. He’ll post something on his blog, and the Linux community will absolutely eviscerate him and say, “I don’t even understand whether this guy gets Linux.” But it gets people talking.

Adam: Yeah, I do think he’s good at that. I’ve never met Mark. I know Jono Bacon at Ubuntu, and he is a great guy. He says that Mark’s a great guy and I’m sure he is, but he does have a great naive act where he says, “Well why can’t we just click a button and do this?”

[laughter]

Everyone’s like, “Well that’s insane. There’s never been a button for that!”

Sean: There’s never been a button in there. There shouldn’t be a button there. And he goes, “Well everybody wants a button to be there.” And everybody eventually goes, “Yeah. OK.”

[laughter]

How would you contrast your business model and approach to packaging and distribution for users and for businesses versus Ubuntu?

It seems that some of what you do is very similar to Ubuntu, in terms of the way you position yourselves, the way the distro is built, and the audiences you target. At the same time, another portion seems more similar to Red Hat, in the sense of your enterprise focus.

Adam: Mandriva has a very wide presence; we’ve always been an “absolutely everything including the kitchen sink” type of distribution. I guess it’s kind of an historical thing, because as I say, we started off a long time ago.

The Linux world was much smaller then, and we were at the time a comparatively large company. It was pretty normal and feasible to take 30 guys and have a web server and a distribution that worked as a server, a desktop, a firewall, and just about anything else.

We are trying to make things a little more focused these days. For the 2007 release, which would be about two years ago, we dropped several versions of the distribution that were editions. We dropped the PowerPack Plus and Discovery commercial editions.

Now we only have one commercial edition, and we sort of simplified the rest of the range. The idea is to focus a little more on Mandriva Linux as mainly targeting a desktop user base and then to separate out corporate server and corporate desktop a little more as a separate corporate line.

The Red Hat comparison probably works best as sort of a mini Red Hat idea. We have the Corporate line and then we have the Mandriva Linux line, which is more an end user community based kind of thing, a little bit like Fedora.

Sean: This was the year of the Linux desktop. Do you feel that one of the things that inhibits that is the fact that every piece of the Linux desktop wants to “market itself” as independent? Users get kind of confused because they get the platform, and Vista hasn’t exactly rocked the world either.

People go in and buy a box that says Vista on it, and it doesn’t say “Volume Shadow Copy version 5.8,” which relieves them of the clutter of feeling like they have to understand whether 5.8 is better than 5.7.

I wonder sometimes whether it’s important for the Linux desktop to fuzz the boundaries of the distribution, sort of the way Ubuntu has done, in order to relieve the user base of that kind of adoption complexity.

Adam: This is definitely my personal view and not the view of Mandriva, but I don’t think there’s going to be a year of the Linux desktop. I think desktop computing is going to become mostly irrelevant before that ever happens. Everything is going to go to mobile devices.

There’s going to be some kind of convergence in the space between netbooks and cell phones and smart phones. We’re going to wind up with a science fiction vision of the device in your pocket that does everything. But that’s just my personal view.

In terms of your question, though, I agree that what you describe is a drawback in a sense for the Linux desktop. I kind of gave up focusing on how to win all the users in the world a couple of years ago.

[laughter]

Adam: Instead, I focus on how to keep making the product better, and how to serve the users we have. I think it’s legitimate to view Linux as something for maybe 20 percent of the most technically inclined users who like to tweak and are curious.

That leads one to the view that maybe what we have isn’t perfect for everyone in the world, but it’s a good product in its own right. It does what our users want, and we’re just going to keep refining it and focusing it and improving it and growing that group of people gradually.

Everyone knows that Apple is never going to have more than 10 percent of the desktop market or something, but no one seems to think that’s a problem. That’s what Apple is supposed to be.

Scott: We could probably talk about Apple all day, especially in terms of the Apple enthusiasts that complain about Microsoft not being transparent.

Adam: Right–Apple is 10 times worse. Apple is the black box, and you have no idea what the hell is going on inside. What comes out is usually pretty good, but if you want transparent development, Apple is not the place to go.

Scott: We had a conversation with somebody a while back about whether proprietary software will continue to exist, or whether it will all go open source. Their point of view was that there’s always going to be room for a great product, regardless of how it’s developed. It sounds to me like the goal with Mandriva is really to be a great product, rather than to espouse open source.

Adam: Actually, we do care a lot about open source, and it’s important to stress that. Otherwise we get a lot of hate mail.

[laughter]

Adam: We’ve always had a free distribution. Since 1998, we’ve been releasing Free with every release. Everything we develop is always free software. We do believe in a lot of the arguments that free software development is inherently a better way to do things. If you go too far the other way, though, you end up with GNewSense, which the FSF loves, but no one uses.

Most people want a great product. If you develop a great product then people are going to use it, and we definitely focus on making Mandriva a great product. We love open source, and we try to push open source development. We got things like RadeonHD and Nouveau in the distribution, trying to push for open source components in place of proprietary ones.

Scott: Open source is a collaborative way of developing. You’re less likely to produce features that nobody’s going to use, because if there really were such things, nobody would write them. Users know that they’re unrestricted in how they use the end product. In other words, basically, my personal view is that the ethos of open source delivers value to the end user, even if they don’t buy into the philosophy of open source.

Adam: I have an interesting take on it because I work in this little nexus. As I said, I interact with users directly every day. I maintain stuff for the distribution, but I don’t code. I’ve never been an engineer, even if I’ve learned how to fix tiny little things just by trial and error and using Google.

But I can actually see everyday occasions where open source helps me and helps the users, even though neither of us have a clue how to write a garbage allocator. There are still instances where it’s important and really useful to me to be able to grab the code or do other things that are directly possible because of the open source nature of the environment.

You can talk to authors, you can download a project, and you can look at the documentation. You can email the author, and he’ll probably get back to you within a day. You’re not going to get anywhere trying to do that at Microsoft–you can try to email the author of Windows Media Player, but it’s just not going to happen.

I see positive outcomes from things like that literally every day in my work, where open source helps people directly.

Scott: I think we’ve come to the end of our time. Thanks for talking with us today.

Adam: Thank you–it’s been a pleasure.

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