Open Source learnings - cultivating an army of killers

Did you know that authoring best selling novels and being successful in running a digitized business has important commonalities? It's about killing your darlings. But in business, you don't end up with an ending that everyone keeps talking about - you end up with the ability to adapt to change. And I'm writing about software here, it's illegal to kill employees.

Any enterprise of decent size will have a large number of (software) darlings at any given time. These darlings springs out of necessity and always solve real problems. Sometimes they were very innovative at the time of conception or initial implementation. But as time moved on, so did the world. More and more people started to encounter the same problem and the solutions to this same problem became more and more novel and effective. I'm not only talking about the struggle against in-house developed spaghetti code here, but about commodity software solutions in all fields, be that a self service portal, an orchestration engine, a monitoring system, a storage, database or middleware solution, etc.

The keepers of these darlings are often teams of subject matter experts who simply are very emotionally invested in this specific technical solution - because they've spend years becoming experts at them, gaining reputation and respect. Because they are subject matter experts, it's not really that simple to question them either.

Change is scary and if these experts can - many will opt for things to be the same, for ever and ever. The problem is that many fields of technology, architectures and processes are now experiencing very rapid change. What was true 5 years ago is most likely not true today. With that said, getting a crisp and clear NO from some technology team is not your biggest challenge. The biggest challenge is when they say YES and then go on and tweak their existing solution, invented in a world which knew nothing about your current challenges - and force it to become the solution.

Now, you may say: "Yeah, but this is how it's always been and will always be. It's always painful to rip off that bandage." But what if I told you that there were an innovation model where killing your darlings has been the rule since around 1983? I'm talking about the Open Source innovation model. It rules an ecosystem of millions of pieces of software where millions of programmers work on software used by billions. A brutal ecosystem where the ones who's the best at innovating and collaborating becomes the winners and the many other solutions becomes internet history as contributors and users jumps ship.

Almost all pieces of open source software has multiple competitors with different approaches and architectures. For each successful implementation, many lay dead on the ground. The Linux operating system has a myriad of different distributions, many of which you have never heard of - and then there is BSD - just to mention one field of technology. In the field of Open Source - when subject matter experts refuse to face facts and do not turn to new tools and new ways of thinking - their projects die.

By realising a simple thing - that there are no future proof solutions - you can go ahead and implement what many companies already have in place - an Open Source strategy. A strategy which simply aligns you to the fact that selecting an ecosystem of interoperable solutions makes a whole more lot of sense than putting all your bets on one really old horse. Cultural change is tough, but when you make it to the other side of the tunnel, you will no longer have to deal with teams who give you bad advise and refuse to kill their darlings or do Frankensteinish hacks to force them to fit new purposes. Instead you will have teams who are ready to move as the the next sea change happens.