Nurturing Ideas Into Open Source Projects?

lkehresman asks: "Over the course of the past few years, I have been involved in numerous open source projects and have been discovering the wonderful oddities with this development model. However, I am perplexed as to how one would go about starting a project with the bazaar model, and if it's even possible. Indeed, ESR states, "One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in the bazaar mode." Is this true? Can anyone give any personal testimony to projects that have succeeded being built like this from the ground up?"

"Until recently, I was the leader of the SquirrelMail project. When it started, we released version 0.1 and people started hacking on it. However, when we decided to do a rewrite, we attempted to start over using the bazaar model from the ground up, allowing for group discussions and decisions. We got caught in a years worth of discussion before any code was actually developed (now, however, its development is well under way and flourishing). I've seen this through personal experiece with countless other projects as well.

As I am venturing into this territory once again with a new project, I'm wondering if anyone in the community has had personal experience with this, and can lend advice as to how to avoid endless bickering about trivial issues. Having a code base to release is obviously a key factor, but in this case, that simply isn't possible due to the magnitude of the task at hand. Advice?"

Comments

Open Source the best option?

[UltraBot2K1]

ESR states, "One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in the bazaar mode." Is this true?

Oh, it's entirely true. If you weren't in on the ground floor (RMS, Linus, Taco), you don't have that much of a chance of originating a successful Open Source project. I mean, have you browsed at sourceforge lately?

Which brings me to my next point: why open source? If your idea is worth doing, it's worth doing right. Which involves drawing up a business plan, getting funding, and, if you can pull it off, cashing out with an IPO and living the rest of your life on your own tropical island, surrounded by beautiful women. (Okay, to tell you the truth, if you're anything like the typical slashbot the women just aren't going to be happening even with the money; but the island's nice.)

Besides which, we need more innovative tech startups right now to jumpstart the economy. If you look at a chart of new IPOs vs the level of DJIA, the clear trend is that the more IPOs there are, the higher the stock market goes (and therefore, the better the economy is doing). So we NEED more high-tech companies being created and taken public right now. In light of the recent terrorist attacks and their clear purpose of disrupting the American economy, I'd almost say it's your patriotic duty to start a tech-company if at all possible -- the same way it's the duty of every muslim fanatic to travel to Mecca at least once in a lifetime.

Mozilla's one gaping example of what not to do.

[dave-fu]

Having been involved with its development almost from the get-go, in the good old days when Netscape 4.0 was beating the pants off of Internet Explorer and mostly supporting the standards better than IE, I figured it'd be exciting to be in on the ground floor of something new and visionary.
What I wasn't ready for was the clashing of inflated heads, the war of egos, the cacophony of nonsense. I got in on the ground floor, got involved in some flame wars (don't ask what about, i can't even remember) and got off shortly thereafter. The bloating code and slipping deadlines are a testament to the impotence of Mozilla's development model.
The bazaar's just too bizarre for me: I'll stick with the tried-and-true methodology of project leads, senior and junior developers, thanks.