What do Marc Fleury, president of JBoss Group, LLC, David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL AB, and Ian Murdock, chairman of Progency, Inc. and founder of Debian Linux have in common? They all agreed at an October technology show that open source software isn’t made by thousands of developers, but by small groups of dedicated developers. Usually, according to Fleury, these groups number no more than ten.
What do Marc Fleury, president of JBoss Group, LLC, David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL AB, and Ian Murdock, chairman of Progency, Inc. and founder of Debian Linux have in common? They all agreed at an October technology show that open source software isn’t made by thousands of developers, but by small groups of dedicated developers. Usually, according to Fleury, these groups number no more than ten.
It sounds like heresy, doesn’t it? Isn’t open source development supposed to happen with dozens, nay, hundreds or even thousands of developers? Well, yes, that’s the idea. But, that’s not how it works.
You don’t have to believe them, though. Just look through SourceForge (http://www.sourceforge.com) and you’ll find that most open source projects are written by only a handful of developers.
This isn’t really too surprising. Fred Brooks’ software project management classic, The Mythical Man Month, remains as true now as it was when his wrestling with an early mainframe made him realize that throwing more programmers at a late project just makes it later. Open source development isn’t magical: Brooks’ insight applies to it, too. Indeed, successful open source projects seem — at least to me — to always have a single leader, such as Linus Torvalds, or a core team such as the Perl Porters or the Samba team. And, even in the case of Linux, Linus would be hamstrung without the support of such powerful coders as Alan Cox.
Back in 1999, a University…
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