[OSGeo-Discuss] scale of FOSS projects

[Howard Butler]

On May 6, 2008, at 3:10 PM, 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.
>

I think really successful open source projects are successful because  
of serious organization, not necessarily a fire hose of funding. By  
serious organization, I don't mean a rickety scaffolding of  
bureaucracy.  OSGeo's incubation process prescribes a bureaucracy  
(project steering committees) onto projects to be accepted as part of  
incubation.  Some projects within OSGeo embrace this whole heartedly,  
while others continue their lieutenants' model or dictatorship due to  
those being active ending up making the decisions -- with the checks  
and balances the PSC approach hopes to achieve (no project as far as I  
know has had such a knock-down, drag out to actually test this  
assumption).  The incubation process tries to prescribe the PSC model  
because it desires that incoming projects "be organized" in such a way  
as to be able to keep its own house in order in the event of problems  
that affect its open development.  I think development organization is  
what sets apart one blob of source code from another where both might  
do the same thing.  I think OSGeo wants projects that are thriving  
communities for a number of reasons, but I'll leave it up to others to  
decide if we actually meet that bar with all of our projects.

Serious organization requires infrastructure -- something that's easy  
enough to get these days (SourceForge, Google dev, even OSGeo if you  
can jump through the hoops) -- but more importantly, it requires *use*  
of that infrastructure.  One thing that I have found out recently when  
developing on a small open source project (http://liblas.org) is that  
Brook's notion about geometric communication load applies.  With a one  
or two person project, does it make sense to file every notable change  
into a bug tracking system, ensure that changesets only deal with one  
specific issue, and avoid communicating about design and code  
organization in forums that do not log things for posterity?  The  
overhead to do that stuff is fixed, and quite expensive especially  
considering that you only have one or two folks writing the software  
hoping to get it to a functional point.  Without it, however,  
interested parties have no real way to empower themselves into  
becoming active contributors to the project without drawing  
significant load from the active developers.  Because developers come  
and go to a project, this process repeats itself unless the project  
itself makes it possible for people to bootstrap themselves -- a long  
term investment unlikely to pay off at all in the short term.

> 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?
>

There sure is a reason to compete -- to build (or aspire to build) a  
better product.  MapServer, for example, has Mapnik.  I think Artem's  
quest to show us how wrong we were has had a positive impact on both  
projects (speaking as a MapServer dev).  Each software does different  
things better, and both projects have driven innovation in the other.  
I would say that Mapnik still doesn't have all of the inertia that  
MapServer enjoys, and I think it suffers from some of the  
organizational challenges I described above (MapServer too), but from  
my perspective it has been steadily gaining steam and meets any  
definition of open source success.  It hasn't needed OSGeo to have an  
impact.

MapServer and Mapnik overlap in a lot of conceptual areas, and there's  
plenty of room for both.  What there isn't plenty of is C/C++  
developers who wish to develop open source GIS rendering software for  
web applications.  I would argue that if there are any monopolies to  
be gained in open source software development that they are monopolies  
of developers' attention, not monopolies of software products.

Howard