Next up in our series of interviews is Bdale Garbee, Chief Technologist for Open Source and Linux at Hewlett-Packard. Garbee is a steady fixture in the Linux community, known for his work at HP as well as Debian Project Leader.

Forrester Research advises its clients who are considering open source tools to examine the so-called ecosystem around a particular product -- the pool of developers, forums, paid support and commercial versions -- to determine if there's enough support available. It notes that if an open source project has, say, 700 developers and a good ecosystem, then it's a better risk than a proprietary product from 20-person startup.

At the 2009 linux.conf.au Penguin Dinner, Bdale Garbee "agreed" to shave his beard if enough funds were pledged toward the cause of protecting the Tasmanian Devil from extinction. On January 22, Linus Torvalds did the honors. Something between AU$35,000 and $40,000 was raised through this effort.

Unlike proprietary software, open source software is not developed by a single company or group of developers. Instead it is developed by many different companies, thousands of individual developers and hordes of hobbyists.

In a recent survey by Packt Publishing, 70% of software developers said that they have donated time, money, or both to open source projects. However, with large projects like Wikipedia receiving over one million dollars from just three charitable foundations last year, the question remains whether open source really needs individual contributions from developers to survive.

The VideoLAN project, developers of the open source VLC multimedia player, is urgently seeking developers to work on the Mac OS X port. According to a posting on the VLX forums "there are now effectively zero active developers for MacOS" which has already led to the 64 bit releases of VLC for the Apple operating being put on hold.

"Microformats are open data formats that some Yahoo! sites support. You can't see them (unless you do a "view source" on a web page), but they're there -- bits of HTML that describe things like contact information (hcard), a review (hreview), an event (hcalendar), or a listing (hlisting). Microformats make data in web pages reuseable since the data is in a standard, canonical, format instead of just a jumble of HTML. Thousands of sites expose their data in Microformats, and that data is available for developers to use. One of the best opportunities for developers to make use of Microformats is in the forthcoming Firefox 3 web browser which features a new global Microformats object and API. The new API makes finding and parsing Microformats trivial and efficient..."

We now have over 300 different developers signed up to help create, and maintain Linux drivers! What we need now is more companies participating in the project, we have the developers, but not enough work to keep them busy.

A contributor to the Debian GNU/Linux project since 1994, Garbee has also been leader of this project, and currently is chairman of the Debian technical committee and also the acting secretary. Hence, it came as no surprise that his talk on "Collaborating successfully with large corporations" at the Australian national Linux conference in Hobart today was well attended.