If you’ve got an understanding of free and open source software
licensing, project management skills and experience with Sourceforge.net, Google may be looking for you.
The search engine giant has posted a position on the popular
Craigslist site for an open source program manager. The posting comes in the same week that Google hired Mozilla Firefox lead engineer Ben Goodger and Mozilla contributor Darin Fischer.
The job posting may be indicative of a further advance into the open source community as it adds staff to its open source roster.
According to the Craigslist posting, Google is looking for a candidate who can manage technical programs in its open source software programs
office. Project budgeting, planning and execution will be the job
responsibilities for this position.
Perhaps as evidence of how Google
perceives the importance of its open source software programs office, the new hire will also get to work with executive, engineering, finance, legal and public relations marketing staff at Google. The new “open” Googler will also have to have the fortitude to deal with the technology press.
Among the listed qualifications required for the position at Google is, “experience with Sourceforge, Tigris and Savannah and able to properly leverage them.” All three of those tools are essentially open source project management and collaborative development tools.
Sourceforge.net is arguably the world’s largest repository of open source software. Savannah is the home to the Free Software Foundation’s software repository and Tigris is also a collaborative development environment, this time sponsored by Collabnet (run by Brian Behlendorf of Apache fame). The need for experience with those tools leads to speculation about whether the position involves making use of projects that are hosted at those sites, or if it involves actively participating and/or starting new Google-sponsored open source projects at those sites.
It also looks like the new hire will be reporting to well-known open
source community member Chris DiBona, who has been a Google employee since
late 2004. Chris DiBona is well known in the community for having been an
editor/author for the popular open source site Slashdot.
Dibona briefly mentioned the job position in a blog posting that he
titled, “You crazy!”
“So if you are crazy enough to want to work for me, check it out! It is a
tricky position to fill, as you can imagine,” Dibona wrote.
A Google representative was not immediately available for comment.
