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January 19, 2006
451 Group + OS Community
Matt Asay works at Novell, and also runs a blog AC/OS. Being at Novell, this gives him a clear perspective on Open Source, and real business models. So his piece the nature of open source community talking about The 451 Group is particularly good and relevant. The root of the argument which he picks apart is that Open Source community is necessarily better than a paid developer community. I think it certainly can be, but is not really guarenteed to be at all, and perhaps even in the majority of cases does not measure up. It is those shining success stories though, Linux, Apache, and PHP which really stand out.
Matt's comment on coverage in this area being glib is a particularly relevant one. I'll add that I think particularly vibrant communities tend to spring up around projects which fit a niche not filled otherwise. Areas such as operating systems, webservers, and browsers come to mind because the alternatives had various issues with quality, security, and openness across platforms.
His blog is quite good, and I recommend it. I also found this piece There Is No Open Source Community by John Mark Walker makes a similar argument at ONLamp.
Posted by admin at January 19, 2006 01:29 AM