[OSGeo-Discuss] Open Location Services

[Miles Fidelman]

P Kishor wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 3:47 AM, Cameron Shorter
> <cameron.shorter at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> As you are probably aware, just dumping code into sourceforge is not an
>> effective way to start a successful Open Source project.
>>
>>     
> The above makes sense, but honestly, I had never heard of this until
> now, and I have been tinkering with open source for almost a decade
> now. Most open source projects seemed organic to me. Someone had an
> itch, they scratched it, they put it out, and the project either
> gathered traction, or it died. Seems like my scholarship of open
> source has been lacking in this aspect hugely.
>   
Actually, the history of successful open source projects (long-lived, 
widely adopted, well supported by a broad community) is very different 
than "having an itch to scratch."

I've seen several major development paths for successful projects:

1. Funded research project that gets widely adopted.  Open sourced as a 
way to maintain availability and support.  Classic example: Apache 
(started as the NCSA web daemon).

2. Variant of the above: Project that starts as a research project ends 
up as a hybrid open-source/commercial enterprise.  Classic examples: 
Sendmail, PostgreSQL.

3. Internally funded project - by a university or corporate team - open 
sourced as a way to reduce support costs and/or widen adoption.  
Generally retains some ties to originators.  Examples:  Sympa (mailing 
list manager funded by a consortium of French universities), Erlang, Zope.

4. The jury is still out on the various projects that have been 
developed for purely commercial reasons, with an open source 
("community") version released as both a way to broaden the market and 
to reduce development/support costs by leveraging outside contributors 
(e.g., OpenSolaris, Aptana Studio, ...).   The virtualization space 
seems to be a place where the uncertainties associated with this model 
are playing out (e.g., would you stake your business on Xen or VirtualBox?).

Not sure how I'd characterize the various BSD unix varients, and Linux 
is a clear outlier - that may well be as close to an "itch to scratch" 
that succeeded as there is.

What these all have in common is that:

i. somebody and/or some organization had a serious internal reason for 
developing a piece of software, and in almost all cases had a source of 
financial support for the work

ii. there are serious "business" reasons for open sourcing the code - 
broadening a user base, reducing development and support costs, etc. - 
and serious attention was/is paid to organization and management issues


Miles Fidelman

-- 
Miles R. Fidelman, Director of Government Programs
Traverse Technologies 
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