Simon Phipps's Blog

At F/OSS

I am (unexpectedly) at the MIT/HBS Free/Open Source Software conference at Harvard. The first session included a paper comparing Apache, Mozilla and a commercial software project. The results suggested open source development does indeed deliver higher productivity levels and lower defect counts than closed team development. While I felt intuitively that this was the case, I'm pleased to see a growing research base supporting the fact.

All three papers also suggested that, regardless of the overall size of the community, most of the work was conducted by a core of participants which, as one delegate pointed out, tended to be of similar size to hunter/gatherer groups across human history. Much of the presentation activity is trying to model and understand effects which seem intuitively correct but lack logically coherent discussions.

But the one topic I'm not sure is really being explored is the phenomenon of commercial involvement in open source activities. All the discussions assume that all the participants are volunteers, but in communities like NetBeans.org and OpenOffice.org there are a large number of participants who are employed as professional engineers to participate in the community. I'll be watching today to see if this dimension gets some airtime.

Comments

• Interesting
  I would be curious to see how the closeness of the software to being a large part of the infrasstructure in a system corresponds to the degree of commmerical involvment..

  I would also be curious of how the differences that arise from competing Commerical orgs that choose different OSF projects for the solution effect both SOF projects such as the example of NetBeans and Eclipse..

  ON the OSF side we tend to get similar plugins/tools in both IDEs but on the other hand we tend to get un similar support in several commercial areas of both IDEs..even though both are OpenSource

  Posted by: shareme on June 19, 2003 at 11:34 AM

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.