I live a double life. This is never more clear than when I'm at a conference, like I was earlier this week, and I get to meet a person who reads my blog in person.
From their perspective, I'm a guy that blogs about WordPress for the Regular Joe. I'm writing about plugins, themes, comparisons, and how-to. They also know I write tips for WordPress freelancers and small product companies.
Then we meet in person and I start talking about my day job – which isn't this blog.
And they're surprised that for the last two decades my entire focus has been in Enterprise Software.
Enterprise software can be characterized in several ways:
- The coding takes the least amount of time on a project (compared to meetings, requirements, QA, deployment, etc)
- Projects are big, take a long time, and cost a LOT of money
- Phrases like “risk mitigation”, “intellectual property”, and “capacity planning” become the norm
Now, I'll be honest. Until only relatively recent times, the other way you could characterize enterprise software was that it was often focused on proprietary code. The notion that every line of code needed to be created within the company working on a project. That the value of the code was that it represented intellectual value (“property”) and that therefore it had to stay private.
But for the last ten years, at least, open source software has been chipping away at this last notion.
Anyway, this year's survey from North Bridge suggests that the tide is turning in a big way!
If you don't know North Bridge, one way to think about them is that they're some of the folks that invested in WP Engine.
And of course I bring this to you because WordPress is one tiny part of a much larger open source landscape.
Here is their survey results.