Four lessons Cisco has learned from the open source community

As the blogosphere continues to chat about Cisco opening up its IOS crown jewels to customers and third-party developers, who knew that Cisco is also 'open' in the another area of the data center. Writing as a guest blog in Grid Gurus, Jeff Squyres, architect at Cisco, explains why the company is participating in the Open MPI initiative - a program made up of industry and research representatives to standardize the Message Passing Interface API used for parallel and/or distributed computing. 

He writes that Cisco has learned the following as participants in large open source projects:

* Open source is not "free" -- someone has to pay. By spreading the costs among many organizations, we can all get a much better rate of return on our investment.

* Consensus is good among the members of an open source community (e.g., some members are only participating out of good will), but not always possible. Conflict resolution measures are necessary (and sometimes critical).

* Just because a project is open source does not guarantee that it is high quality. Those who are interested in a particular part of a project (especially large, complex projects where no single member knows or cares about every aspect of the code base) need to look after it and ensure its quality over time.

* Differences are good. The entire first year of the Open MPI project was a struggle because the members came from different backgrounds, biases, and held different core fundamentals to be true. It took a long time to realize that exactly these differences are what make a good open source project strong. Heterogeneity is good; differences of opinion are good. They lead to discussion and resolution down to hard, technical facts (vs. religion or "it's true because I've always thought it was true"), which results in better code.

What other lessons can open source teach Cisco?

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