oss.org.mt

Reproduced from Cnet News

by Matt Asay

Companies and their affiliated communities often sit uneasily together, awkward partners at the software dance. To balance the two, companies often seek to reduce corporate control of community through open-source licensing, but this strategy may be diluted by the common requirement to require community contributors to sign contribution agreements.

Nothing could be worse for the formation of true, code-contributing communities, according to Brian Aker, former director of architecture at MySQL:

[R]equiring contributor agreements destroyed outside MySQL development to the kernel, and left MySQL in a position where no substantial, or many, contributions ever occurred.

And yet most people would point to MySQL’s community (as Microsoft’s Dan Jones does) as a key reason for its success.

Perhaps they’re talking about different kinds of community?

Of course they are, and both kinds are important. MySQL attracted a broad-based user community, one filled with developers who modified and embedded MySQL to meet a vast array of different needs. Did it have a solid base of outside contributors who wrote the core of the MySQL database. No. But at tens of millions of downloads each year and a final sale price of $1 billion to Sun, few in the MySQL community are likely to complain.

The reality is that very few open-source projects succeed in attracting and marshaling significant outside contributions. Linux, Eclipse, and Mozilla all do, and perhaps for reasons I’ve identified before, but they are the exceptions to the rule.

Even so, it’s surprising just how significant the communities are around an increasing number of enterprise open-source projects, which communities include both users and developers, a significant number of whom actively contribute code to these enterprise applications. Who would imagine a community of millions forming around developing and using software designed to help the world’s largest enterprises solve some of their biggest problems? In other words, helping the Man feed…the Man?

Strange, but true.

Jaspersoft today announced some remarkable community numbers. More interesting, however, is that Jaspersoft isn’t alone in this.

Let’s run the community numbers for a few of the more successful open-source application companies, Jaspersoft, Alfresco, SugarCRM, and Zimbra:

* Zimbra gave me the number of active forum registrations, which is arguably a better metric than raw forum/documentation registrations, which is what I was able to collect from the other companies.

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