[OSGeo-Discuss] scale of FOSS projects

[jo at frot.org]

Increasingly the projects that OSGeo accepts into incubation are
ones that have been created and supported by a large organisation - a
company or agency - now seeking to get more people from "outside", who
they are not directly supporting, properly involved. 

In the past i've heard it suggested that really successful open source
projects now need serious organisational backing. They can't be built
by a network of partly-funded enthusiast contributors alone. 

(There *are* noble exceptions, but those are projects which either
have been around for a good long while, or which are libraries reused
and maintained by several projects as "collective infrastructure")

"This project is mature enough to be used for the task, without fear
it's going to disappear without a trace... that's part of what OSGeo
incubation is all about"

I wonder about a cultural climate generally - NOT an OSGeo-specific
one - in which projects have to have a certain amount of institutional
support in order to even get *into* the incubation process, let alone
graduate out of it. I heard this complaint from a few Apache Software
Foundation people a couple of years ago. They were getting so many
applicants for incubation - and had several dozen projects in the
incubator at once - the only was to really assess quality going in,
and commitment to future maintenance, was to focus on projects with
40+ committers and existing corporate support. (This "culture change"
in turn led to core ASF'ers keeping their newer projects *out* of the
foundation. Now there are more "ASF brings you Yahoo!'s..." projects like
http://hadoop.apache.org/)

If a project has a given amount of momentum, marketing resources
applied to it, a contributing user community; is there any sense in
"competing" by building something new with a lot of conceptual
overlap? If there isn't, don't de facto monopolies start to develop
inside FOSS as much as they do in proprietary software systems?

A situation where a very few projects make it into broad and stable use, 
and a very many just spike, flutter and fade - well perhaps the open
source ecology has always looked this way. But the more a few projects
gather monopoly momentum, the less likely it is that newer projects
can build up sufficient scale to challenge them. The kind of incubation
process run by OSGeo, ASF, then serves to accentuate and promote this. 

If this is inevitable, why? Is innovation less possible outside the
"enterprise"? Is this even a FOSS problem or a computing-in-the-broad one?

(Please note i *don't* intend any criticism of the projects that are
coming through incubation at the moment. It's great news that
latlon.de now see more potential value in deegree becoming an OSGeo
project than in being marketed as a latlon project. hooray!)

I would appreciate hearing any thoughts that this provoked. 


jo
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