Episode 3: Interview Doug Schmidt

Open Source

Open source development has significantly influenced middleware, as Douglas Schmidt explains through his work on the ACE ORB, also known as DAO. Initially developed as a project at Washington University, DAO evolved with contributions from global developers, enhancing its performance and efficiency. Schmidt highlights the role of open source in attracting talented individuals worldwide, leading to innovations like optimized event demultiplexing and encoding techniques 1.

One of the great things about the open source community is you get a lot of really smart people all around the world focusing their brainpower on improving that technology base.

--- Douglas Schmidt

This collaborative effort resulted in DAO becoming competitive with commercial middleware solutions, supported by companies like Prism Technologies and Remedy 2.

   

Collaboration

The role of community and collaboration in software development is pivotal, as Douglas Schmidt emphasizes through his experiences with open source middleware projects. He notes that a large community of developers contributes to quality assurance by identifying and fixing software flaws, thus enhancing the learning experience for students involved in these projects 3.

Having an open source community where there are literally thousands of people around the world who will quickly find your flaws in your software and beat you back into submission to fix it, has been quite an educational experience.

--- Douglas Schmidt

This collaborative environment fosters a culture of quality control, utilizing distributed continuous quality assurance and build environments to ensure robust software development 4.