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Is Media Attention Bad for Linux?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the it-sure-wastes-a-lot-of-time dept.

Ender_Stonebender writes "Yahoo's Internet Report news page has an interesting article on why why media attention could be bad for Linux development. They have a byline saying it's from salon.com, but I can't find it there. "

1 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Is someone not paying attention? by ajs · · Score: 5
    Open-source hackers are accustomed to hearing the likes of evangelist Eric Raymond declaiming authoritatively upon the whys and wherefores of open source, but there's a paucity of hard data to work from.

    While, I think the idea of a survey of Open Source data-points (e.g. employment, work habits, motivation, etc) would be great, I don't get this. If you actually read Eric Raymond's writing, most of it is based on real-world experience with the projects that he has worked on and those that he has had direct contact with. Netscape, for example, provides a wealth of data in their release of the Mozilla source. How much work can be harnessed from the community? Look at the changelogs....

    Same goes for things like GNOME. We know exactly how fast a given sized group of hackers can put together a large Open Source software effort, because we've seen it.

    What we don't have numbers for, and I don't think that a survey can establish this any better than ESR can, is this: what happens if your company wants to create an Open Source effort around your product? Answering that requires the answers to these questions:
    1. Do you have a product that will entice developers to work on it?
    2. Are you willing to spend time and energy in the beginning to assure the developer community that you're for real, and actually care about what happens to the code?
    3. Is there a competing effort (or reason to create one) that more developers will be interested in?

    For example, if Sun opened up the source to their C++ compiler, I'm sure the GCC/EGCS folks would enjoy getting a look at how Sun handles some of the SPARC optimization, but I can't see a lot of developers clustering in to help Sun develop their product. It's just not technically interesting enough. It's not portable, it has less than 5 language front-ends and it just doesn't have the clout in the community that GCC has.

    On the other hand, if Adobe were to open up the source to Illustrator, and really convince the community that they wanted to jump in with both feet, the way Netscape did, they would have a huge developer interest.

    In the end, Open Source is not so much a "phenomenon". This is the way software worked pre-80's. Hiding source seemed to make about as much sense to most people as trying to hide how a lightbulb works. Now, we're coming full circle, and people are cluing in to that. The "Open Source Phenomenon" is just a bunch of people trying to figure out how to make the intervening 20 years of industry make sense....