Welcome to the show!

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends

We're so glad you could attend

Come inside! Come inside!

~From Karn Evil 9: First Impression on Emerson, Lake, & Palmer's Brain Salad Surgery Album

ELP is one of the original progressive rock bands with the original likely being King Crimson (Greg Lake's original band). Prog music is fun to trace because you can see influences inside and outside the genre even into pop music. The music industry is an interesting ecosystem that is always riding an edge between IP protection and creative license. When does a technique or a riff or lyric move from protected property to open source? And as most would agree, the music industry does not deal well with open source. :-) However, there are many examples of modern music openly using classical riffs from greats like Beethoven and Bach - so it does exist. And so it goes with the software industry - there are fits and starts with ISV's incorporating, developing, and contributing to open source but it is happening and becoming a larger and larger factor in ISV strategies. And thus it goes with BMC - we actually have, since Y2K, incorporated, developed, and made open source contributions - but generally not in a strategic context. Now we are.

In my last blog entry, I mentioned; "Such a strategy requires an infrastructure that narrows the distance between the platform provider and the developer community". This was an allusion to our BMC Developer Network which whurley announced at OSCON this week.

We've actually been semi-live with BMCDN for a couple of months, migrating the Remedy groups and also creating new forums aligned with our BSM strategy. We are also in the process of migrating the DevCon (a.k.a.: PATROL Developer Connection) to BMCDN. But, as you can tell, our release Open Source adapters at BMC is significant and, I believe, helps complete our ecosystem approach.

BMCDN is by no means perfect nor complete.  We had a choice to attempt sterile perfection or to get the word out and truly commit to having the developer community drive the structure and content of the BMCDN. We chose the latter. So we have an initial structure and we have some content, but I'm hopeful that a year from now we'll have something completely different that has been tailored and built in conjunction with our development community.

I would like to acknowledge the hard work over the past year by people on my team including Ken Beck, David Fiel, Joe Vodvarka, Scott Powell, and Luis Laborda in getting this BMCDN ready. This not only included development of the infrastructure, but also included getting the open source adapters built, licensing schemes debated and agreed, and coordination with R&D and Marketing.

I'm excited about what we have and more excited about where our development community will take it. Come and join the show -- the BMC Developer Network developer.bmc.com!