Community is changing the face of the tech industry as open-source projects continue to grow and even established companies have learned to rely on developer communities for growth. Now, vBrownBag, a series of online webinars, is helping developers and engineers build better solutions.

Alastair Cooke, trainer, writer and consultant, and Cody Bunch, private cloud/virtualization architect, VMware vExpert, and VMware VCP,  joined Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely, cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at VMworld to talk about their contributions.

Well-rounded engineers

Cooke is a big proponent of the power of community-generated knowledge. “Fundamentally, the idea is the community of people who use the VMware products are the best people to teach each other about how the products work, rather than getting all of the marketing story about how it’s supposed to work,” he said.

“We start with a video podcast that is helping one another to study for certification … . As we’ve started to cover all of VMware certifications … we started covering Cisco, and storage and general automation using non-VMware tools, trying to help our engineers who are working with the VMware products become more rounded engineers.”

This concept can feel foreign to commercial organizations at first, but “they’re having to come to terms with the fact that the best content is actually generated not by the person who’s trying to sell you something, but by the people who have built it, and for open source it’s the developers,” he added.

Bunch agreed. “It is a much more community-driven effort all around — software development, education, documentation — all of it is very grassroots. You will have your corporate sponsors, your Red Hats and your Rackspaces that show up and dump a ton of money into it and a ton of effort into getting things developed, but it’s all with the mind of continuing for the … good of the software project as a whole.”

Improving team focus and responsibility

Building products in community also improves team focus and helps everyone take responsibility for the final product. “In the open-source space, there’s nowhere ‘over the wall’ to throw it,” Cooke said. “The guys implementing this are also the ones writing the code a lot of the times. Maybe not directly, but very closely related.”

Cooke’s been impressed with the way VMware, Inc. has integrated the open-source community. “I think one of the changes I’ve seen over the last two years is the change to embracing more open source. I really didn’t expect what we saw last year when they started [to] open source some of their products and some idea that that’s a good idea for them to do. It’s a complete turnaround from what we saw in the past.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE