[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
In the past i've heard it suggested that really successful open source
projects now need serious organisational backing. They can't be built
by a network of partly-funded enthusiast contributors alone.
The other way is to do something so obviously "correct" that a community
clusters around it :-)
I wonder about a cultural climate generally - NOT an OSGeo-specific
one - in which projects have to have a certain amount of institutional
support in order to even get *into* the incubation process, let alone
graduate out of it.
I have found it an interesting trade off; institutional support keeps
the GeoTools project alive and very busy. None of those institutions are
concerned with graduating from the incubation process directly (ie
graduation does not effect any deadlines) - thus work is proceeding very
slowly on volunteer time.
If a project has a given amount of momentum, marketing resources
applied to it, a contributing user community; is there any sense in
"competing" by building something new with a lot of conceptual
overlap? If there isn't, don't de facto monopolies start to develop
inside FOSS as much as they do in proprietary software systems?
That is true; but there is still plenty of space for collaboration (and
competition) - see the recent discussion on a shared Java referencing
project.
A situation where a very few projects make it into broad and stable use,
and a very many just spike, flutter and fade - well perhaps the open
source ecology has always looked this way. But the more a few projects
gather monopoly momentum, the less likely it is that newer projects
can build up sufficient scale to challenge them. The kind of incubation
process run by OSGeo, ASF, then serves to accentuate and promote this.
One thing we stress in the incubation process (possibly as a counter to
the effect you mention) is some kind of open development process. That
is within each project we expect a procedure to allow new contributors
(and contributions).
If this is inevitable, why? Is innovation less possible outside the
"enterprise"? Is this even a FOSS problem or a computing-in-the-broad one?
It is a broad problem of "mind share", I recently ran across a proposal
to use cocoon to do some web user interface work; the technology is
certainly capable and even pretty - but web front ends have progressed
so away from XSLT that cocoon does not represent a fashionable
alternative (ie no "mind share").
I would appreciate hearing any thoughts that this provoked.
Happy hacking,
Jody
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