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On my flight home from California, I finished up Clay Shirkey's excellent book, "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations."

In chapter 10, "Failure for Free," he discusses open source projects as one of the great innovators in technology. His argument is that companies invest in their best ideas, but open source invests in just about anything. Every once in while, some project becomes wildly successful, like Linux, or Joomla. (Although he doesn't mention Joomla.)

At the end of the chapter, he tells the story of working as a consultant in the mid-90's, trying to convince AT&T to write some code in Perl, an open source language, rather than in C++. C++ was invented at AT&T, and there was someone they could call for support. With Perl, there was no commercial support, just a discussion board where you could go for help. AT&T could not believe that they could possibly put their faith and trust in an open source project, powered by an enthusiastic and helpful community. Even with rapid, correct responses on the Perl discussion group, AT&T could not rely on the faith and good will of the Perl community. Instead, they wanted a contract, which they felt was far more reliable than a bunch of unpaid volunteers acting out of the goodness of their heart.

Of course, years later, Perl is thriving (yes, even now), and AT&T isn't doing nearly as well as it was 15 years ago.

There were two paragraphs that made the biggest impression on me at the end of the chapter.

Perl is a viable programming language today because millions of people woke up loving Perl and, more important, loving one another in the context of Perl. Members of the community listen to each other's problems and offer answers as a way of taking care of one another. This is not pure altruism; the person who teaches learns twice, the person who answers questions gets an improved reputation in the community, and the overall pattern of distributed and delayed payback -- if I take care of you now, someone will take care of me later -- is a very practical way of creating the social capital that makes Perl useful in the first place.

Can we substitute Joomla for Perl and CMS for programming language in the above paragraph?

Joomla is a viable CMS today because millions of people woke up loving Joomla and, more important, loving one another in the context of Joomla. Members of the community listen to each other's problems and offer answers as a way of taking care of one another. This is not pure altruism; the person who teaches learns twice, the person who answers questions gets an improved reputation in the community, and the overall pattern of distributed and delayed payback -- if I take care of you now, someone will take care of me later -- is a very practical way of creating the social capital that makes Joomla useful in the first place.

Joomla's software is indeed special, and it pays my mortgage. But in some ways, much more importantly, my best friends are Joomla people too. I love the fact that I have friends all over the world. I hope to meet them all in person one day.

And when I've had a question, all I had to do was ask it, and there were many people reaching out to me to answer it.

Shirkey closes with another great insight into open source:

What the open source movement teaches us is that the communal can be at least as durable as the commercial. For any given piece of software, the question"Do the people who like it take care of each other?" turns out to be a better predictor of success than "What's the business model?" As the rest of the world gets access to the tools once reserved for the techies, that pattern is appearing everywhere, and it is changing society as it does.

Once again, I found myself reflecting on Joomla over these last five years.

Do we love each other enough, we in the Joomla community, to keep this project going another five years? Ten years? I hope so. The backbiting and nastiness I've seen in the community over the last year is disheartening, to say the least.

Yet I've seen plenty of people in the community move past this and reach out to each other, planning birthday parties for Joomla, working on the Joomla 1.7 user interface, working through bugs in Joomla 1.6, founding new user groups, and evangelizing for Joomla wherever they go.

Do the people who like it take care of each other?

What have you done to take care of your fellow Joomla person today?