Cooperative Development
Many of the assertions of “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” including the now famous “given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow,” are based on the idea that the Internet enables a larger community of develop- ers than can be applied to a project by even the largest companies.
By making the users of a product into codevelop- ers, you speed debugging, improve quality, and gain specialized new features that may eventually turn out to be important to a wider audience. Because open source allows users to “scratch their own itch,” fea- tures can be introduced with low overhead, and live or die in a marketplace that is much more fecund than even the fevered pace of Silicon Valley venture capitalists (and orders of magnitude more so than the centralized product planning of large companies).
This community development aspect of open source means that user communities, not the prod- ucts themselves, may be the key determinants of a project’s success. As an entrepreneur and angel investor, I am approached by many developers look- ing to turn a marginal product with little market acceptance into a star using open source as some kind of magic bullet. But it doesn’t work that way. The product must meet a real need, and attract a passion- ate core of users who want even more from it than the original developer has provided. Nor can a vendor with an established product hope that by contribut- ing that product to an existing open-source commu- nity, they will suddenly galvanize support for that product. Instead, a product must be open sourced to the community of its users.
This leads to an idea that may be anathema to some open-source advocates because it doesn’t adhere
to the Open Source Definition, but that may have some merit, especially for large companies wanting to leverage some of the principles behind open source without committing to full free software redistribu- tion, most notably by potential competitors. And that is the creation of what you might call, somewhat face- tiously (as did a participant at a recent large company executive briefing on open source), a “gated open- source community.”
A company with a large user base might want to keep strict control over who has access to its source code (paying customers), but provide full source code, complete documentation, and mechanisms for customer extensions to be folded back into the core source tree. The company may want to study how open-source projects like Apache manage collabora- tive development, and apply those principles to inter- actions with its customers, without planning to release the software to the world. This was in fact the way software was handled in the early mainframe days—software came free with the hardware, and such IBM products as CICS were originally devel- oped by customers and contributed to IBM for main- tenance and further development.
The lessons of the Apache project, as outlined by Roy Fielding in his contribution to this section, are extremely relevant in this regard. A community needs to develop processes for voting on new features, deciding who has access to the source tree, and communicating in ways that do not stifle the free-floating development that is so central to the appeal of open source.
Of course, one key question in such an experiment would be the size of the developer community required to get the open source “network effect.” Many proprietary developer communities may just be too small. In order to leverage the entire Internet- accessible developer community without giving away the store, vendors are starting to experiment with new licenses. One approach is to distribute source code, and allow unlimited modification and redistribution for noncommercial use, but require a different license for commercial distribution.
This is the approach taken by Sun’s recent Java Community Source License as well as by the Aladdin Free Public License used by Peter Deutsch, developer of the widely used GhostScript package. In an interview (www.devlinux.org/ghost/interview.html) Deutsch explained his thinking on “community development”:
If you are willing to play by what I think are the 1960s rules, then the Aladdin license gives you exactly the same rights and benefits as the GPL: [the software is] free to use, it’s free to copy, and you are free to modify it.
In a nutshell, I see the 1960s rules, or the cooperative
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