Open Source Stories: Sebastien, Developer @ Microsoft and Lead Developer on the Orchard Project
Sebastien Ros, a developer on the ASP.NET MVC team, talks about the early days of Orchard, how to get started contributing and keys to successful projects.
What do you currently do at Microsoft?
I am a developer — I currently work on the ASP.NET MVC team. I switch between ASP.NET MVC as well as Orchard, so depending on the workload we have for my other team or Orchard, I go from one project or the other. In the same day I can work on two projects, so it depends.
Orchard?
Orchard is a content management system like WordPress. It’s pretty much the same thing but made in ASP.NET and MVC — it’s both open source and free. The goal is that we can provide an open source CMS built with ASP.NET and MVC.
Is Orchard a Microsoft-led project?
Officially, no. It was created six years ago at Microsoft by ten engineers within a team at Microsoft. Orchard was open source from day one, and eventually was housed under the .NET foundation. It was never branded as a Microsoft project. It has switched completely two years after and has become much more community-driven. So now it’s not really Microsoft product any longer. I could not be here tomorrow and the product would still be alive. For a lot of Microsoft projects, if all the developers were to disappear, the project would die. But this project is much more community-managed.
When did you get involved with the project?
I got involved around 2010. The project started in 2009 and I moved from France to join Microsoft in 2010 to work on the project. Since then I’ve been doing that and other projects within Microsoft but I was always active on this project. I’m the lead developer on it in fact, but it lives by itself. I mostly drive the community as well as the meetings that occur.
Is this your first open source project?
Yes and no. This is the first at this level because it’s not necessarily open in the way people can see the source code. It’s open in the way that people contribute and drive the source code. It’s not just us doing what we want and simply showing the source code. It’s a community effort and community-managed project. So I’ve worked on other open source projects before but these projects were typically where you were the only contributor and people would be able to use it as a free product, not really open source in both ways — give and take. So at this level, yes — it’s my first open source project. But it’s been six years since and it has definitely changed. That’s the way it goes in open source.
What do you like about this project? Why do you keep nurturing this project?
At first it was because it was a potentially broad project with lots of users, but there weren’t any users at first. So what was interesting was building a tool that people could use. It was not really open in the way that people could contribute to — they were waiting for something to be there. Then the project became interesting in the next phase because it gave you more responsibilities so you have to deal with the project but also with the community. Now it’s interesting because it’s like growing the circle of people that you meet and work with. It’s not just your five or 10 colleagues in the same open office. Anyone can join the community and give their opinions. Some days someone will come with two weeks of effort, give us their code and say, “Look what I did,” and we’ll think it’s amazing. So all of this is what makes Orchard interesting to me — to be able to exchange with people from various origins, backgrounds, opinions. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. But it’s always a surprise. I’ve never had a boring moment. There’s always something new happening.
“All of this is what makes Orchard interesting to me — to be able to exchange with people from various origins, backgrounds, opinions. I’ve never had a boring moment. There’s always something new happening.”
How can people contribute to Orchard? How can they get started?
The simplest thing to do is to create issues that will say what a user thinks is bad or doesn’t work — improvement or what’s missing, just as feedback. Soon people will join meetings because we do two weekly meetings, which are open on Skype, where they can join and talk with us to drive the project. We’ll ask them questions on what to improve, and attendees might give us their opinion about a project or just talk sometimes, just following us. There are also people that might not be confident enough to provide code, so they’ll write documentation or fix typos in the code. They think that’s easier so they’ll do it, which is great. The most ambitious contributors usually come with new modules or they have a vision for the project that they’d like to work on. The project is open to anything — any success, any failure. I think that if you just try, that’s totally fine. We won’t bite them or fire them — after all, they voluntarily came to the project.
What do you see for the future of open source projects? What do you think needs to happen in order for them to be successful?
An open source project never fails — it’s just done and people can still continue to use them because they’re open and never die. You can fork them. There is just no more activity because… well, the job is done. Sometimes it’s just like this. So no failures. A project does fail, however, when the project itself cannot reach the audience they are trying to target. Still, as long as there is one user that’s happy with it, even then — the project didn’t fail. It maybe failed for the person who made it, but not for the person using it. In terms of continued success in open source… the key is momentum — to not only reach momentum, but to also keep momentum alive. On the web, for example, you have some websites that have been around for 20 years. But after 10 years, some websites haven’t changed at all. This is still kind of a success because the website is still living even if nobody is working on it. It’s not growing necessarily, but it’s still alive.
Quick Bytes
Favorite Coding Environment & Tools: Visual Studio, Git and Git Extensions
Favorite Late-Night Coding Snack: I don’t snack when I code. I’m too focused — I don’t have time to eat!!
Favorite Swag: My Orchard shirt
Role Model: Not role models necessarily, but people who I think are great are Ariya Hidayat and Nicholas Blumhardt
