Open Development Communities

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Discussion

Why diverse communities of developers are so important for Open Development of Open Source Software

1.

Nelson Ko [1]:

"Understanding the nature of the community that produces the open source software is a critical part of evaluation that is often overlooked by users who are new to open source software. Unlike closed source alternatives, key support options for open source software include non-commercial channels provided by an extended community. Therefore, important criteria that should be considered when evaluating open source software include the size and vibrancy of the community, the availability of online documentation, and access to support via mailing lists, forums, and IRC (Internet Relay Chat). One source for such information is statistics on sites such as SourceForge and Ohloh. However, both sites focus on the contribution of developers and it is important to note that contribution to an open source community is more than just commits to the codebase. As in commercial software, production of good open source software also requires documentation, testing, support, training, and the incorporation of user feedback. An understanding of the maturity of the community can help to answer questions such as "what support mechanisms are available if we roll out this software?" and "how difficult will it be to install and use this software?"An evaluation of an open source community should also consider the broader ecosystem in which it exists. An environment in which open source is prevalent results in consumer choice that is arguably unparalleled in closed source ecosystems. Open source software has a clear advantage in some domains, for example, in the area of wikis. Freely downloadable open source solutions are plentiful and comparable in terms of quality to their expensive, closed source counterparts.

A deeper understanding of the nature of the community is also critical in determining the nature of support that will be available for an open source software. It is important to consider the nature of the resources the community has to offer in relation to the capabilities of your organization. For example, the Tikiwiki and Drupal communities have a large number of highly technical members who can provide support at a high level of technical sophistication. On the other hand, another popular content management system Joomla, has a relatively smaller team of technical experts combined with a larger community of less technical but more design oriented individuals such as graphic designers and web designers. Largely as a result of this structure, the Joomla support forums tend to become somewhat overwhelmed with questions of a "how-to" nature. Discussions over more complex technical issues are therefore less prominent. On the other hand, it is much easier to find consultants that are able to make low cost design customizations for Joomla than it is for Drupal or Tikiwiki. Another benefit of open source software like Joomla that is exposed to a wider swath of mainstream users is that they tend to be more user-friendly, although this usually comes at a price of reduced functionality." (http://www.osbr.ca/archive.php?issue=10&section=Ar#A6)


2.

" at the end of the day, the most crucial issue is the development community. It is the strength and the diversity of the development community which is the best indicator for the health and the well-being of an Open Source project.

But what about end-users, I hear people cry? End users are important, to the extent that they provide ego-strokes to the developers, and to the extent that they provide testing and bug reports to the developers, and to the extent that they provide an economic justification to companies who employ open source developers to continue to do so. But ultimately, the effects of end-users on an open source project is only in a very indirect way.

Moreover, if you ask commercial end users what they value about Open Source, a survey by Computer Economics indicated that the number one reason why customers valued open source was “reduced dependence on software vendors”, which end users valued 2 to 1 over “lower total cost of ownership”. What’s important to commercial end users is that they be able to avoid the effects of vendor lock-in, which implies that if all of the developers are employed by one vendor, it doesn’t provide the value the end users were looking for.

This is why whether a project’s developers are dominated by employees from a single company is so important. The license under which the code is released is merely just the outward trappings of an open source project. What’s really critical is the extent to which the development costs are shared across a vast global community of developers who have many different means of support. This saves costs to the companies who are using a product being developed in such a fashion; it gives choice to customers about whether they can get their support from company A or company B; programmers who don’t like the way things are going at one company have an easier time changing jobs while still working on the same project; it’s a win-win-win scenario.

In contrast, if a project decides to release its code under an open source license, but nearly all the developers remain employed by a single company, it doesn’t really change the dynamic compared to when the project was previously under a closed-source license. It is a necessary but not sufficient step towards attracting outside contributors, and eventually migrating towards having a true open source development community. But if those further steps are not taken, the hopes that users will think that some project is “cool” because it is under an open-source license will ultimately be in vain. The “Generation Y”/Millennial Generation in particular are very sensitive indeed to Astroturfing-style marketing tactics." (http://thunk.org/tytso/blog/2008/04/26/organic-vs-non-organic-open-source-revisited/)