On 22 Feb, 13:40, ship <ship....TakeThisOut@gmail.com> wrote:
> For example, how do Open Source developments like Linux work?
"Linux" isn't a single "development" (certainly not an open source
one) it's a whole bunch of them. Each of these individual developments
is quite independent and doesn't really talk much to the other
developments. Some of these developments are purely unpaid voluntary
work for the love of it, some are "foreigners" done by people paid to
warm a desk for other purposes, some are commercial development work
that finds itself published under an open source licence. Open source
does _not_ mean that there's no commercial involvement in a project!
Just look at JBoss, or many other serious bits of commercial product
where their end-user licence is open-source (to varying extents).
There's no single "Linux" any more and there hasn't been for some
years. It's too big now - there's no real overall control of the broad
topic.
At most there's a number of "distro" projects, such as Ubuntu, RedHat,
SuSe etc. At the level of the distro, there's a lot more commercial
involvement in the project Someone, with money invested, has their
arse on the line to make the package appear on time and to work when
it does so. They then have to herd cats to make this happen. Some of
these overall distro packages are purely open source and distinctly
charitable (Ubuntu), some are still open source but are closely tied
to a fee-based commercial model (RedHat).
At the level of the project (a chunk of work small enough to retain
some conceptual direction) then this can either be one person's work,
a loose team, a big loose team with a small committed management core
or something else. Generally the useful well-defined products that
work well are one or two persons' work (or vision, or mostly a handful
of peoples'). The vapourware that duplicates another well-known
product, promises some tasty feature that never ships, and never
really has the bugs shaken out is usually the product of a well-
intentioned but unmotivated "team" that happened to fall into the same
place on SourceForge. Only rarely (e.g. Firefox) is a big team ever
managed or motivated to deliver something that's too big for one, yet
actually happens for real. Sadly this is a rare state for open source
projects.
> What motivates people to contribute?
Generally because you couldn't shut them up if you tried. Geeks make
code, they just do this. Open source doesn't cause geeks to make code,
it doesn't much change the code they make, it just changes what
happens to it after they've made it. Before commonplace open source,
geeks wrote the same stuff and were pleased if someone from the next-
door office used it, or they made enough from $5 shareware to pay for
the postage. Nowadays the default is that it gets open sourced and
everyone has the option to take a look.
Open source as a distribution mechanism is still _far_ more common
than the "many eyeballs" model of devleopment.
> And what about wikipedia - is that based on the same principles?
Wikipedia is different. On Wikipedia, the project is the "page", or
sometimes the project-based small set of pages. This is small enough
that single people can often build a whole page entirely from scratch
and bring it to fruition. For that reason, Wikipedia manages to make
effective use of a vast "team" of wikipedians, without having anything
in the way of overall project management (it has editorial control,
but that only filters, it doesn't motivate). Software development just
hasn't worked the way Wikipedia has. Many of Wikipedia's best pages
are almost solo efforts, some of the worst pages ("duck typing")
failed because there's no overall management or direction.
> So... what books or white papers should I read to get an over-view of
> the principles involved?
Hard to recommend anything that isn't out of date already. Hard to
recommend many of the others, because if you didn't read them years
ago when they were fresh, you're already so far behind you're going to
have a nightmare catching up. Certainly you need to have read plenty
by Eric S Raymond ("Cathedral and the Bazaar" is the obvious starter,
Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Lessig, the foundation documents for
Creative Commons, Wikimedia (NB Wiki_m_edia the foundation, not just
Wikipedia the project). Not to mention the licences themselves, like
GPL (and variants), Apache, CC-by-sa etc. and to appreciate the
distinctions between them. There are some more academic studies too,
especially on user communities, notions of shared value or reward
within them (HP Labs have published on this).
>> Stay informed about: I need advice on how to set-up & run a "social network"..... 
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