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Definitely a shift in conversation
"Enlightenment, Fossil, FreeBSD, MediaWiki, Mercurial, NetBSD, OpenBSD, PostgreSQL, SQLite, XFCE . . . ?"
OK, good examples. Probably the best ones in there are the BSDs and PostgreSQL, because those are large projects that needed decades to become what they are.
"I do not believe that having corporate "benefactors" (that is, corporate contributors) is the same thing as being "under the thumb of corporate interests"."
That's true. It depends on the project. A lot of them (like Ruby) seem to be on a steady march towards being an extension of a business.
"One of the benefits of open source software is the fact that it is in the best interests of heavy users of open source projects to contribute code and/or money to those projects."
My concern is when the overwhelming majority of contributions come from a business; that is when needs of that business start to override those of the community. I'm not sure where the line in the sand is, but it most certainly exists. A lot of projects are "open source" in that anyone can get the code, but the project is hardly a "community effort".
"You've gone from asking if "open source" is a business product differentiator to claiming there's no real open source any longer, and that stuff we call "open source" is just a loss-leader."
That's a shift in conversation, the two are tangential to each other. If there is a lot less true "open source" than we think, than it obviously is less of a differentiator. And yes, that's exactly how I see a lot of "open source", as a loss leader.
One thing I note, is that in the "big name" projects you listed above, while they are "big name" to you and me, a lot of people have never heard of them, and very few have actually used them. I think that MediaWiki is the only one on your list with widespread usage. And it's truly unfortunate, because in that list are a lot of truly superior projects. Mercurial? My SCM of choice. The BSD's? If I could do what I need to do in them, I'd gladly switch. Enlightenment and XFCE? I hear nothing but praise for them (I don't touch C so I can't personally vouch for them). PostgreSQL? Great system.
But... where's the market share? And barring that, where's the visibility? I know that the BSDs have decent adoption in the server room, but few people care about them past that (I'll be stunned the day sites like this rename their "Linux and Open Source" categories to be "Linux, BSD, and Open Source" for example). I think there are a number of factors behind it, but the lack of a big company making big bucks off the project is a lot of it. "The community" can only go so far. In my personal experience, most sys admins have *heard* of BSD, but aren't exactly sure what it is. Few developers have even heard of PostgreSQL. Last I heard, Mercurial's market share was around 2%, which is depressing considering what a "night and day" difference it is compared to SVN and TFS. That's actually the truly criminal one if you ask me. I think the average person won't notice much difference between Linux and BSD, or MySQL and PostgreSQL (or even Oracle and SQL Server...). But going from SVN, TFS, SourceSafe, etc. to Mercurial is an unbelievable difference, yet it's not happening en masse like I'd hope for.
If your only concern is really great software, that's well and good and you can make your decision based solely on that. But if you need to work within the confines of the "typical business environment", all of a sudden, picking the technically best project is not the only factor. For example, if you want to build a project based on PostgreSQL running on FreeBSD, a supervisor in a Windows shop and probably a LAMP shop is going to shoot it down because they don't have the internal knowledge to maintain it. And that sucks. Having that big corporate benefactor (or ruler) goes a long way in changing that.
So yes, I think that there are some great open source projects without that corporate master... but I definitely wonder why they aren't making inroads.
J.Ja
OK, good examples. Probably the best ones in there are the BSDs and PostgreSQL, because those are large projects that needed decades to become what they are.
"I do not believe that having corporate "benefactors" (that is, corporate contributors) is the same thing as being "under the thumb of corporate interests"."
That's true. It depends on the project. A lot of them (like Ruby) seem to be on a steady march towards being an extension of a business.
"One of the benefits of open source software is the fact that it is in the best interests of heavy users of open source projects to contribute code and/or money to those projects."
My concern is when the overwhelming majority of contributions come from a business; that is when needs of that business start to override those of the community. I'm not sure where the line in the sand is, but it most certainly exists. A lot of projects are "open source" in that anyone can get the code, but the project is hardly a "community effort".
"You've gone from asking if "open source" is a business product differentiator to claiming there's no real open source any longer, and that stuff we call "open source" is just a loss-leader."
That's a shift in conversation, the two are tangential to each other. If there is a lot less true "open source" than we think, than it obviously is less of a differentiator. And yes, that's exactly how I see a lot of "open source", as a loss leader.
One thing I note, is that in the "big name" projects you listed above, while they are "big name" to you and me, a lot of people have never heard of them, and very few have actually used them. I think that MediaWiki is the only one on your list with widespread usage. And it's truly unfortunate, because in that list are a lot of truly superior projects. Mercurial? My SCM of choice. The BSD's? If I could do what I need to do in them, I'd gladly switch. Enlightenment and XFCE? I hear nothing but praise for them (I don't touch C so I can't personally vouch for them). PostgreSQL? Great system.
But... where's the market share? And barring that, where's the visibility? I know that the BSDs have decent adoption in the server room, but few people care about them past that (I'll be stunned the day sites like this rename their "Linux and Open Source" categories to be "Linux, BSD, and Open Source" for example). I think there are a number of factors behind it, but the lack of a big company making big bucks off the project is a lot of it. "The community" can only go so far. In my personal experience, most sys admins have *heard* of BSD, but aren't exactly sure what it is. Few developers have even heard of PostgreSQL. Last I heard, Mercurial's market share was around 2%, which is depressing considering what a "night and day" difference it is compared to SVN and TFS. That's actually the truly criminal one if you ask me. I think the average person won't notice much difference between Linux and BSD, or MySQL and PostgreSQL (or even Oracle and SQL Server...). But going from SVN, TFS, SourceSafe, etc. to Mercurial is an unbelievable difference, yet it's not happening en masse like I'd hope for.
If your only concern is really great software, that's well and good and you can make your decision based solely on that. But if you need to work within the confines of the "typical business environment", all of a sudden, picking the technically best project is not the only factor. For example, if you want to build a project based on PostgreSQL running on FreeBSD, a supervisor in a Windows shop and probably a LAMP shop is going to shoot it down because they don't have the internal knowledge to maintain it. And that sucks. Having that big corporate benefactor (or ruler) goes a long way in changing that.
So yes, I think that there are some great open source projects without that corporate master... but I definitely wonder why they aren't making inroads.
J.Ja
Contributr Posted by Justin James
12th Jul 2011
