[OSGeo-Discuss] scale of FOSS projects

[Cameron Shorter]

Jo, consolidation is a natural progression in any market, even Open Source.

This is driven by user requirements, which in turn drives resources.

Users in general want maximum functionality for their investment. They 
want low risk. They want future proofing. This is usually achieved by 
selecting the best, most successful project in their niche. So the rich 
projects get richer, and poor get poorer.

Note also that the cost of reviewing all applications to suite your 
business needs is expensive. So it is valuable for users to have a 
"quality stamp" applied to projects to help focus their search. At the 
moment, OSGeo is providing the "quality stamp" for OSGeo projects.

jo at frot.org wrote:
> 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
>   


-- 
Cameron Shorter
Geospatial Systems Architect
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5050
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254

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