[OSGeo-Discuss] scale of FOSS projects

[Landon Blake]

Jo,

You have touched on an issue dear to my heart. I have a lot of work to
do this afternoon, so I can't babble on as I normally do. But, I can't
resist one or two short comments.

Jo wrote: "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."

I won't disagree with this perspective, I will only offer this point for
consideration:

An open source project appears more stable to me if it is supported by a
"network of party-funded enthusiasts contributors" than a single
corporate entity. 

Why?

What happens when that corporate entity is sold, goes out of business,
or looses interest in the open source project, or looses funding for the
open source project? 
Users have very little control over the corporate decision making
process.

An open source project supported by a diverse group of volunteers has a
much greater chance of surviving in my humble opinion. OpenJUMP would be
one example of this. If it had depended on its original corporate
sponsor for survival it would have died a long time ago.

I think the ability to fork open source code puts a real limitation on
the ability of any one entity to create an "open source monopoly". Forks
are the ultimate evil in the open source world, but they sometimes
become the necessary "nuclear option". One open source program that I
can think of that survived a serious fork is Inkscape/Sodipod, with
Inkscape now being what I would call an successful open source project.

Landon


-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of jo at frot.org
Sent: Tuesday, May 06, 2008 1:11 PM
To: discuss at lists.osgeo.org
Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] scale of FOSS projects

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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