Unless licensing and an organizational charter is strong enough to ensure its survival and operation outside of shareholder concerns, most developers won‚Äôt invest their personal capital in the project unless they are being paid to do so. This is why open source developers mistrust projects controlled by commercial entities. Companies are a vessel for shareholder value, and their motivations spring from protecting and growing that value. Why is this important? It‚Äôs difficult to trust companies since you don‚Äôt know who will be making the decisions in the future. (Meaning: in the kernel community you gain standing through your own code contributions, not who pays your paycheck.) Decisions are made by individuals, not by companies. He is a practical person and his organization reflects that, as well as his motivation.Īnother important difference is that the Linux community is made up of individuals, not companies. Linus is an engineer whose primary motivation was building good software. While some would argue that personal politics play a role, it‚Äôs clear that a wide range of code gets merged into the kernel every release, and that a healthy discourse and analysis of the merits of that code are the contributing factors to its inclusion. (See Jon Corbet‚Äôs How To Contribute to the Linux Development Community book.) These rules are based on merit. What‚Äôs the difference? First of all, Linux development has clear rules of engagement that are well understand and tested. Some make the argument that Linus, Andrew and company assert a large amount of control on Linux development. At the same time, we should urge them to make the structural, licensing and organizational changes needed for the widest number of individuals and companies to benefit from contributing to Open Office. Instead of beating up on Sun, we should all thank them for their support for Open Office. There are market incentives for them to pay developers to enhance the platform. As the paper we published last year on kernel development shows, a wide range of companies support the majority of Linux development (IBM, Novell, Red Hat, etc).ĭo those companies support Linux for charity? Absolutely not. But make no mistake: commercial support for open source is incredibly important. It‚Äôs shown again and again that too much central control of an open source project by one entity impedes its growth, especially in the ranks of the development community. In fact it may be counter-productive to do so. We shouldn‚Äôt rely on Sun to save us here. Yet, are we coming down to a two horse race in the office productivity space, to a world dominated by Microsoft and Google? Since neither are open source solutions, I worry that we would be beholden to the same proprietary forces that have shaped the desktop market. Google‚Äôs office suite works increasingly well and supports open standards thus it‚Äôs highly preferable to Microsoft. While I agree with him that OpenOffice is important, I worry even more about the alternatives if it were allowed to fail. Leaving the project to a single vendor to resource & carry will never bring us the gorgeous office suite that we need. Does Open Office matter to those of us who want to see and use free software exclusively? Michael says:Įveryone that wants Free software to succeed on the desktop, needs to care about the true success of : it is a key piece here. Last week Sun formally responded with a post that details their own statistics that not surprisingly paint a different picture, even though they concede that issues being fixed are going down. What is stopping corporations investing similarly in OO.o ? Diversity: the linux graph omits an in-chart legend, this is a result of the 300+ organisations that actively contribute to Linux interestingly, a good third of contribution to Linux comes from external (or un-affiliated) developers, but the rest comes from corporates. Time range – this is drastically reduced for the Linux kernel – down to the sheer volume of changes: eighteen months of Linux‚Äô changes bust calc‚Äôs row limit, where OO.o hit only 15k rows thus far. OO.o peaked at around 70 active developers in late 2004 and is trending downwards, the Linux kernel is nearer 300 active developersĪnd trending upwards. Michael Meeks, open office developer, started this controversy with his recent blog post on whether Open Office is a ‚Äúdying horse.‚Äù The last few weeks have seen a number of posts about the health of open source office productivity software Open Office.
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