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Our Blogs Open Sauce Hey FOSS project, what's your pedigree?
Our Blogs Open Sauce Hey FOSS project, what's your pedigree? | Hey FOSS project, what's your pedigree? |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 20 June 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 There are some rules, though. After the SCO Group filed a case against IBM for breach of contract and also claimed that its IP had been stolen, kernel hackers were asked to make formal declarations about their code contributions so that there would be no legal problems down the line. You have to admire Torvalds' manegerial skills when you realise that any number of organisations have tried to control the direction of kernel development (there are suspicions these days that corporates dictate the agenda - but nothing beyond suspicion), the latest being the Linux Foundation. Torvalds seems immune to all these factors and he includes what he sees fit. He has described himself as a bastard but I think he's probably the nicest one among that species. A second organic open source entity in the FOSS ecosphere is the Debian GNU/Linux project. Here the driving force was an individual who wanted to create a distribution that would adhere to free software guidelines. (At the time, there was Slackware (which was a commercial distribution, even though it started as a non-commercial endeavour) and also SuSE.) Debian has become an unprecedented success and though it does have a little more of a formalised structure - it has its own social contract, for one - the original idea still remains largely intact. There is no benevolent dictator like Torvalds, there is an elected leader, there are committees vested with various responsibilities but the antiseptic atmosphere which is found in the corridors of non-organic projects isn't there. The coming of Ubuntu, the Linux distribution which is now top of the distribution charts, has made many companies realise that there is a lot of top-notch code out there, which has been developed at no cost, and can be used to a lot of advantage. Ubuntu basically capitalised on the fact that the Debian release cycle was erratic; cutting edge code from Debian (which resides in Debian's unstable branch of development) was smoothened out and six-monthly release cycles meant that geeks and others could benefit from it. The release dates are tied to the GNOME release cycle. But even when companies start their own community projects, it doesn't necessarily mean that they fall into the non-organic category. Red Hat, for example, has the Fedora community project which is freely downloadable. But even Red Hat's commercial products are all open source - there are strictures only on trademarks. The measure of success of a community project appears to be directly proportional to the extent to which it is identified as being organic or non-organic - this is my own theory. |
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