The Open source 'Brotherhood'

In this recent article from Silicon.com, Martin Brampton discusses the open source software and the reality of the people who comprise the open source software community.

“We all know IT is inclined to favour the young. But people working on open source projects are much more dramatically grouped than IT as a whole. Studies over the past few years have shown that three-quarters of the participants were less than 30 years old. A clear majority were single and most had no children. But the most extreme characteristic was that almost all open source developers are male. In short, open source software is largely written by young men with no family ties.”

Finally, the truth is out.

Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, we can get down to business...

“Open source projects can be split into at least three different business models. One is based on making software freely and openly available because it will enable the sale of related services - a model used by IBM and many others on numerous occasions.”

“Another is where commercial organisations see a need for software to exist but do not seek direct financial benefit from it. A prime example of this is Google's support for the development of the Firefox browser.”

“The third model is the host of projects that are wholly reliant on volunteers. Generally, only the largest of these achieve any significant income, and many do not seek any.”

Paradoxically, Brampton continues by stating that open source actually prohibits cooperation.

“The whole thrust of the open software movement was originally based on an attempt to sustain the culture that existed in earlier days, when algorithms were freely published and code swapped between developers.

“Despite this background, which should be reinforced by the legal situation that entitles anyone to use parts of an open source work for non-commercial purposes, projects seem extremely reluctant to utilise the work of other groups, or to agree common standards”

"Unfortunately, this lack of co-operation, endemic in the general run of open source projects, is one of the factors that leads to inefficiency and waste. At the best of times, most projects fail, maybe in the region of 95 per cent. One reason for this is there are too many projects and too few volunteer developers. A more co-operative approach would utilise the available effort more effectively.”

Certainly Brampton provides an interesting analysis here, but with the last paragraph above, we can detect that he is an outsider looking in to the open source community. Perhaps the open source community (ie those actually creating the code) is actually very happy with its level of efficiency. Indeed, it is probably misguided to even apply the corporate laurel of efficiency to a community not organized for such purposes. Maybe the open source community gathers primarily for creative reasons using software coding as a social conduit for interaction and expression?

http://software.silicon.com/applications/0,39024653,39182126,00.htm?r=1