Bruce,
> Not like:
>
> * Not Linux - no single gatekeeper, project is usable without
> enhancement * Not Mozilla - no company history like AOL/Netscape
> * Not Open Office - no controlling company like Sun
> * Not Gnome - no controlling companies
> * Not PHP - no Zend steering development
> * Not Sendmail - no control by Sendmail, Inc.
> * Not MySQL - no MySQL AB that does all server development
Some of these examples are redundant. Really, there's only 6 models for OSS
projects:
(please note that the projects cited are NOT based on in-depth research and
may be wrongly classified)
1) Ours: a diffuse leadership structure with a variety of individuals and
companies, but the only participants with clearly "louder voices" are
individuals with seniority & responsibility. Examples: Us, LTSP, Samba,
FreeBSD.
2) Heirarchical: large "volunteer" distributed network of contributors, but
tightly controlled heirarchy at the top (usually a single "high priest").
Model shared by Linux, Perl, Python, OpenBSD. Very common for projects that
started as a single person's work.
3) Corporate-Council: projects which, due to their commercial value to several
companies, are run by a group of company-appointed representatives, with
independant developers largely excluded. Examples Gnome, XFree86.
4) Corporate-Sponsored: projects which either recently or historically have
been financially sponsored by a single company, foundation, or university.
As a result, leadership is hybrid of developer seniority and
company/foundation influence. Examples: Apache, PHP, Slashcode
5) Corporate-owned: Open Source software which is really part of a single
company's project line, and is often offered alongside proprietary offerings
or accessories based on the same code. The company's paid development team
and the project's leadership are identical. Examples: MySQL, OpenOffice.org,
Eclipse, Sendmail, Sourceforge.
6) Single-developer: By far the numerical majority of OSS projects, these
projects seldom have more than one or two serious developers and a few dozen
users submitting bugs. Examples: Flexbackup, XCDRoast, and SQLite up until
6 months ago.
--
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco