Open-Source Sprints for Five Days

STANFORD DAILY - November 15, 2005
By Melissa Fusco

Last week 20 open-source gurus from around the world gathered in Santa Clara for a coding “sprint” to improve technology publicly available to businesses and individuals in the programming community.

The five-day coding extravaganza was organized by Cignex, an open-source services company that helps businesses choose and implement the new technology. This year’s sprint focused on the improvement of a content management system called Plone.

“Cignex has brought about 20 of the top software developers from companies all over the world here to Santa Clara with one goal in mind: to accomplish more than a month’s worth of work in five days,” explained Navin Nagiah, chief executive officer of Cignex.

Open-source software refers to the source code availability of computer software under an open-source license for the purposes of modification, improvement and study. The Linux operating system is open-source, as are many widely-used compilers and the popular Internet browser Mozilla Firefox.

Bringing top coders together was the capstone event of Cignex’s Goldegg initiative, which funds simultaneous work on multiple layers of an existing open source software stack.

“Cignex is hosting this event because our mission is to help businesses improve by using open-source technologies,” Nagiah said.

Among others, Plone manages Web sites for eBay, NASA, German airline Lufthansa and the non-governmental organization Oxfam. It is also the framework for the Burning Man community site, which organizes more than 30,000 people per year for the annual Burning Man festival in Nevada. Included among the attendees were several widely known open-source gurus, including Paul Everitt, executive director of the Plone Foundation and co-founder of the Zope Corporation, an open-source application server for building systems and applications; Rob Miller, who masterminded Plone’s use as a collaboration tool for Burning Man; Joel Burton, chairman of the board of the Plone Foundation; and renowned Zope programmer Michel Pelletier.

Unlike Google’s coder challenge, the Cignex sprint is not a competition between coders, and there is no money prize. Instead, companies that traditionally compete against one another joined forces to improve open source technology for the enterprise.

“It’s kind of weird to think that these volunteers would pay their own airfare to get here and work for free for five days, but that’s the way it works,” Everitt explained. “The value that gets produced at a place like this, and the chance to get to sit down with Cignex, which is one of the biggest integrators for Plone in the world, is a great opportunity.”

Everitt said that participants considered open-source methods as a way of “scratching your own itch.”

“Here, we have to try to balance the idea of going in a single direction and having a clear focus with volunteer interests,” he said.

Open-source technology exerts a strong influence at Stanford, and the event and the top coders participating in it have attracted widespread interest in the coding population on campus.

“The historical influence of the open-source community is huge for anyone who uses computers, even for applications that are not open-source,” said David Berlekamp, a master’s student in Computer Science. “The methods by which they evolve owe a lot to open source technology.”

Since its beginning in the 1960s, the open-source movement has been aimed at harnessing the abilities of a large, continuously active virtual community of programmers to constantly improve programs and has produced many notable successes.

In addition to participating in the sprint, open-source evangelist Pelletier will give a lecture this Wednesday as part of the Electrical Engineering Department’s Computer Systems Colloquium.

The final results from the open-source sprint will be officially released this December.

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