Talk:Open Development

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Ad. Peter Hoddinott and Tony Bailetti article

"We also found instances where what open meant depended upon the level of membership. The more expensive memberships provided these members more privileges to participate in and influence the processes, for example with veto power. In these examples, open is not equated with full access; instead, open is a matter of degree and that degree is metered out in a distinctly defined hierarchy of privilege."

I think the authors are confused here - there are no software projects where every human being has an equal vote - every Open Source project has some structure - at least has a group of 'core developers'. There is always a hierarchy of privilege - so this cannot be any indicator for the openness. This shows why their 'alternative definition' Source (in the Open Source name) - "the process used to produce the code" is rather useless - it seems that they think about something like a democracy with no hierarchies and equal rights - but you can encounter all possible political models inside Open Source projects (from one person projects, through http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?GodKing types to democracies of the core developers but still no 'total' democracies where every user of the software would have equal vote). As a programmer I would never thought that Source in Open Source could mean anything other then source code - and I have the feeling that the point of view of a programmer is the most relevant here. The beauty of "offering practical accessibility to a product's source (goods and knowledge)" (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source) is that it leads to meritocracy just like the 'invisible hand' emerges from right property laws.