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The Changing Face of Open Source

By Andrew Binstock

January 1, 2006 — (Page 1 of 2)
The term “open source” may evoke a romantic image of programmers working late into the night on projects that have caught their interest. In the footsteps of Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, they selflessly toil away, contributing their work freely to the greater good, both in binary and source code form, all the while forgoing any remuneration. This enduring and endearing image, alas, is steadily losing any connection to the real world of open-source products as they exist today. And understanding the differences is key to finding your way around the open-source landscape, as we’ll see shortly.

First, the reality. Open-source programming today is almost entirely a commercial affair. On most projects, the majority of the code is written by full-time developers whose employers are interested in providing support to a specific project.

Earlier this year, I attempted to find out exactly how much these paid developers contribute when compared with independent contributors. I spoke with Marc Fleury, who heads up JBoss, the now-company that once built a full J2EE suite using the old-style community model with Fleury leading the effort. He told me that today, no more than 1 percent of the code comes from independent developers. Mike Milinkovich, who leads the Eclipse Foundation, speculated that the source-code contributions of independents was even less than that. (But, he pointed out, independents do make terrific beta testers.)

This shift from amateurs (in the word’s original sense of doing something for the love of it) to paid professionals has several causes.

The first derives from the complexity of programming today. Most developers must learn daunting codebases to find the routine to which they can add value. And even when they find it, making sure they are actually adding value is another complex process entirely. Only developers who really need the software feature have the motivation to consecrate so much time and effort to making small changes. (Large feature changes are, in many cases, insuperably difficult.)

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