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The Increasing Importance of Community

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the why-does-community-matter dept.

Jono Bacon writes "With the success of Ubuntu and Fedora, and the advent of OpenSuSE and Freespire, are businesses and distributions paying more attention to the community? The Increasing Importance of Community discuss this change in focus. What do you all think? Is the community now more of a priority?"

4 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. A fairly obvious (unpatented) development model by erroneus · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Let the users find the bugs and develop the community version of the OS and take everything that works well and put it into your commercial offering. Seems to work for RedHat so far. But then again, they already had a strong community to begin with. Might work well for SuSE too. But Linspire? We'll see...

  2. Farmed to the bottom of the pile by digitaldc · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The psychology and social structure of a bunch of disparate programmers who are not on your payroll is a pill just too difficult to swallow, and one that is usually farmed to the bottom of the 'lets do this' pile.

    Are we all just difficult pills? Or are we the cure to the boring workplace?

    --
    He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
  3. Re:It is important by Otter · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Without the Linux Community, I would never have been able to properly set up Ubuntu on my computer.

    I think that's kind of the point -- it's become clear to companies that formally supporting home desktop users is a dead end, so they're writing them off as an official market and leaving them to "the community".

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  4. Re:Community Vs Market Share by artgeeq · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Aren't we really talking about "buy-in", or some similar phrase (which escapes me at the moment).

    Having worked with Windows, Exchange, Linux and Sendmail, I have found that it is a great deal easier to get answers when there are a lot of people who are interested in the software. It is hard to be interested in Windows and Exchange. The systems are closed, and it is darned hard to find an answer when something goes wrong. This weekend I was "on hold" for two hours trying to get a lousy hotfix. It is really hard to be interested in that sort of thing.

    On the other hand, with Linux and Sendmail, I can actually look at it and see how it works. When I needed to forward mail to port 26 from Sendmail, I did a Google and there was the answer. The one time I did have a problem with Sendmail, I was able to insert some debugging and code and recompile it --- only to find that the Windows DNS was returning a different error code than BIND. Getting to the root of problems quickly, taking a direct path, having some control over what the heck is going on --- THAT is what I can buy into. (Special thanks to the Linux and Sendmail communities.)