Open Source Studies

Posted by michael on Tuesday October 8, 2002 @03:59AM from the hitting-the-books dept.

e8johan writes "Avaya Labs Research has presented a paper studying the open source process in the cases of Apache and Mozilla. They reach a number of interesting conclusions, the ones I find most interesting are: * Open source projects tend to have a core team of 10-15 coders, producing almost all code. The next layer is a set of developers submitting new features and bugfixes. The next layer is a set of advanced users submitting bug reports. * Open source projects tend to have a lower bug-rate than commercial projects. * Open source projects are generally quicker to respond to user requests. The article also discusses the differences between projects that have always been open source (such as Apache) and projects having a proprietary history (such as Mozilla)."

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Mozilla vs. Apache by ugen · 2002-10-08 04:20 · Score: 0, Flamebait

While Apache is indeed a good responsive project with strong management, Mozilla is a prime example of open source mismanagement. Its non-responsive, riddled with bugs, slow to fix those and generally led in a way we prefer to attribute to "evil commercial" software.
Not sure where are those rosy conclusions in paper came from on the basis of these then.
There are better open-source projects (FreeBSD?), well managed and extremely open to outside users. Development there, by the way, is done by a core much larger then 15 people.