I Sing the Body Electric

I'm not really a Ray Bradbury fan,  I got this title from a Weather Report album, which was no doubt inspired by the Walt Whitman poem. Weather Report was instrumental in the transition from traditional jazz to jazz fusion.  Joe Zawinul (keyboards) and Wayne Shorter (sax) were on a couple of Miles Davis' fusion albums and then broke away, forming the new group called Weather Report.

My favorite album of theirs is "Heavy Weather", which included one of the best bassists of all time, Jaco Pastorius (RIP). A real work of genius on that album is "The Juggler", which has my very favorite song ending  - a single forlorn bass note giving an ironic twist to a complex song. Jaco later connected with Pat Metheny and you can still hear Jaco's influence in Metheny's later albums with Mark Egan on bass.

It's fascinating to trace these influences and their branches into other genres of music. At each juncture, a musician influenced another musician by participating in the creation of new music, but their influence continued well after they moved on.

Before open source, the ISV world was Borg-like, “resistance is futile.  We had no choice but to absorb, regurgitate and attempt influence through traditional marketing, creating countless standards committees, and raiding each other's staff.  Software is now growing up.  Adding open source to the ecosystem creates the opportunity for collaboration between developers regardless of corporate affiliation. The resulting innovations can then be incorporated and used in powerful, sometimes unanticipated ways.  Each participant in the process is affected.

I believe it is mandatory that anyone who calls themselves a "professional" developer must be able to show examples of open source contributions - and the companies they work for should encourage this participation. These contributions become the incubator of innovations that will later find their ways into commercial applications that will help change the world.

I’m proud to say that BMC’s permissive licensing is a potent enabler of rapid development and innovation in the systems management space. Permissive licensing incents developers to build on the baseline code provided and build commercial innovation. And I believe that as such developments become visible to the community there will be natural pressure to encourage contributions back to the community. A good name is still important in the industry. In addition to this, market demand has created the opportunity for enthusiastic partnerships in the new ecosystem to help fill existing and future software needs. This can be in the area of platforms, specialized applications, and variations of current applications. Just look at all the custom applications developers have done on the Remedy Action Request System. It's important to have the infrastructure for the market to express their needs and to have those needs met with either commercial or open source software - and they are not mutually exclusive.

We have all this with developer.bmc.com. Take a look.  Participate.  Give feedback. Check out the new podcast with whurley and me talking more about BMC Developer Network.