[OSGeo-Discuss] scale of FOSS projects

[Jody Garnett]

jo at frot.org 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.
>   
The other way is to do something so obviously "correct" that a community 
clusters around it :-)
> 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 have found it an interesting trade off; institutional support keeps 
the GeoTools project alive and very busy. None of those institutions are 
concerned with graduating from the incubation process directly (ie 
graduation does not effect any deadlines) - thus work is proceeding very 
slowly on volunteer time.
> 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?
>   
That is true; but there is still plenty of space for collaboration (and 
competition) - see the recent discussion on a shared Java referencing 
project.
> 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. 
>   
One thing we stress in the incubation process (possibly as a counter to 
the effect you mention) is some kind of open development process. That 
is within each project we expect a procedure to allow new contributors 
(and contributions).
> 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?
>   
It is a broad problem of "mind share", I recently ran across a proposal 
to use cocoon to do some web user interface work; the technology is 
certainly capable and even pretty - but web front ends have progressed 
so away from XSLT that cocoon does not represent a fashionable 
alternative (ie no "mind share").
> I would appreciate hearing any thoughts that this provoked. 
>   
Happy hacking,
Jody