Open Source About the People

An anonymous reader writes "InfoWorld has a nice look at what defines an open source venture. It seems that the main area of interest, and difficulty, rests with the personnel surrounding the project. From the article: 'But the muddier waters are around the personalities and commitment of the engineers who created the code. How long do they intend to stay? What is their level of commitment? These are fuzzy types of questions - but we know from history that when the core team of engineers that best understands the code up and walks out ... it tends to send a company into a death spiral.'"

Comments

The Missing Link

[Baricom]

The anonymous submitter was apparently too cowardly to submit a link to the article. I think that's the one he wanted.

Re:Great article!

[Eideewt]

Yes, he's kidding. There was no link in the post.

you said design documentation ?

[arkaino]

At that point the company must find new developers / engineers that understand the technology, and it can take months and months for them to decipher from a code perspective how the product works

Well, in this point, I must say he's right. FOSS projects tend to have poor design documentation, and sometimes it's really hard for new devers to commit code in a relatively short period of time if at all.

yes I know, if programmers usually don't like to document code, how can you imagine they will document on design when they're not even told so ?. if that changes someday it will be a pretty good play for FOSS projects expansion and lifetime, don't you think ?

Re:Not "all good" for the customers

[Skreems]

"Open Source" traditionally means more than just that you can read the code. It also implies that you have certain rights, such as the right to modify and recompile the code. Also, with Windows, you can't see ALL the code. You can see a pretty small fraction, as I understand it. You certainly can't get your hands on enough to compile a Windows build yourself.