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Dear Open Source Developers,

I’ve lived in Nashville for over four years now and for a good while I’ve been thinking about what my contribution can be to Nashville as a developer. Nashville is a very heavy closed source business environment and has been for some time from what I can tell and what other people tell me. Now, my company and myself are very much in to Ruby and Ruby on Rails. But, we use many of the same open source technologies to deploy and run our software on as all open source developers do. It seems instead of the fighting between the different open source languages and the different platforms we could find some way to meet in the middle and create more opportunities for all of us.

What I’m discussing is creating an open source marketing & communication movement that hasn’t been a huge success in the past. It can and will take place here in Nashville. Marcus Whitney, of the Enterprise LAMP group has lead the charge and I have followed to work on uniting the Ruby community locally under the Enterprise LAMP group (Nashville Ruby Group). There are still some people I haven’t gotten to be a part of the movement and who strongly disagree with my approach but I feel strongly that is necessary. Many Ruby programmers get caught up in detail that the ‘P’ in LAMP doesn’t represent Ruby. It represents PHP, Perl and Python as choices. That is currently true but there is no reason that Ruby shouldn’t take it’s rightful place in that acronym (even without the ‘R’ in place of ‘P’). Marcus and his group has asked us to participate and we should do what we can in this area because it will only increase our impact and range as Ruby developers.

There have been many efforts in the past by companies such as IBM that adopt and market open source technologies. But we as developers and those who have financial interest in open source technologies should also be marketing these technologies in one concerted effort. Even at the smallest level of one contractor or employee who earns money from development using these tools should be responsible for it’s promotion in the business and development world.

I would like to put a call out to all open source developers to become a part of this movement and help us with whatever resources you can. If you can help financially you can do that, if you can help with knowledge please do that or if you can help by spreading the word to other open source developers that’s awesome too. We all benefit from the progression and understanding of these technologies as a whole. We need to raise the bar and speak in a unified voice. There is a way to be unique and love your own open source choice technology such as Ruby but then make sure you are participating in the open source community as a whole. Together we all benefit and if we can make this work in Nashville we can make it work anywhere.

Lastly, here in Nashville, Marcus and his group has managed to get the PHP, Perl, Ruby & Python developer communities involved under the umbrella of the Enterprise LAMP movement. There is a big conference coming to Nashville in November called the "Big LAMP Camp". Check out the website… there are some big names coming and this is our time to unite and make a push locally.

Thanks,

Will Bridges

CEO / Cogwise Software LLC

http://www.cogwisesoftware.com