Let’s Talk: Interview with Jack Repenning of Tigris.org

Tigris.org is a collaborative development software engineering website that helps design company specific software engineering applications, such as ArgoUML and Subversion. Developers can invite other developers to contribute to their open-source projects. The website has been in existence for about 10 years, and continues to prosper. We spoke to Jack Repenning about Tigris’s initial beginnings and the benefits of collaborative software as a development process for enterprises.

JI: How did Tigris.org get started?
JR: The origins of Tigris are entwined with the origins of CollabNet. The original product of CollabNet was a site called “Source Exchange,” which was basically a place where people interested in doing contracting work could get together with potential customers and provide their services. That didn’t seem to take off, so we moved to the current product structure, which is providing tools to enterprises to develop software in-house to coordinate with developers in the same way that open source communities collaborate.

JI: What sort of successes has the project had?
JR: Unquestionably, the largest success of Tigris has been the Subversion project which was initiated by CollabNet. It has become wildly successful. Another important project was ArgoUML, which was a design tool built around the design language for designing software systems or practically any kind of a system.

JI: Have you discovered that there have been groups of people who keep coming back to work on new projects? Are there people who have met through the site who have gone on to develop other projects just because they enjoy working together?
JR: One of the most interesting dynamics in source work in general is a kind of repeating dynamics. For example, the core of the team who built Subversion had worked together previously on Apache. Many of them before that had worked together on Python. Many of them since then have moved on to other projects. There is a core of what I call ‘serial open-sourcers’ who are the core of any team that they contribute to because they are active contributors, they know what they’re doing, and because they know how to work together effectively in this kind of environment, and they’ll set the culture in personal congregations.

JI: Do you think that open collaboration is the best way to develop software?
JR: Unquestionably, one of the best ways. When it works, it’s almost certainly the best way. There are some limitations of open collaboration. Roughly speaking, what it boils down to is, if it gets people’s attention, if people care, then it is often really successful, but if it ever gets boring, it just totally dies. In that case, it’s more effective to step with a standard enterprise employment model where you tell people, “I don’t care if you’re bored, just do the work.”

For more information about Tigris, please visit their website at www.tigris.org