Why Freeloaders Are Essential To FOSS Project Success

dp619 writes "Outercurve Foundation technical director Stephen Walli has written a blog post arguing that attracting users is fundamental to the ability of open source projects to recruit 'new blood' and contributors who are willing to code. 'So in the end, it's all about freeloaders, but from the perspective that you want as many as possible. That means you're "doing it right" in developing a broad base of users by making their experience easy, making it easy for them to contribute, and ultimately to create an ecosystem that continues to sustain itself,' he wrote."

Comments

Re:It depends on the project

[jellomizer]

The most successful FOSS projects, are infrastructure based projects.
Linux, Apache, Libraries... These general purpose tools, so a lot of people can use them to do different things.
However when you get further up and too specialized apps they will normally not do do well as FOSS because they are still complex to build however they do not have the wide use age. Thus if you need to make the product succeed you need a model where you need to pay for development.

Re:True, sort of

[CanHasDIY]

I think their point is, in any population of X freeloaders, there will be Y people who will, at some point, begin to contribute, so it's never hurtful to have a large population of X.

Plus, the bigger X gets, the bigger Y gets by proportion. Hence the "More freeloaders == more developers" ideology.

Personally, I take a bit of offense to the term 'freeloader.' If you didn't want people using the software without 'paying' in some way, either through fiscal or chronological contributions, you shouldn't be giving it away for free.