Given all the companies riding the open source bandwagon lately, I’ve developed some criteria for myself to tell apart the true open source projects from the fakes. Thought I’d share my thinking.
Community is pretty much the sole determining factor in how I feel about an open source project.
True open source projects in my world have a very diverse community of developers involved. I am not bothered if for-profit corporations are involved, as long as there are more than one of them involved and working alongside individual developers. At the end of the day, we all need to make a living …
Fake open source projects in my world have all the developers working for a single corporation. These developers pretty much call the shots – they may take input from outsiders and even release their source code under liberal license, but at the end of the day, one is pretty much at their mercy. Open source is just a honey trap for these companies.
Developing expertise with a complex code base takes a long time and a lot of skills; furthermore, smart developers do not want to waste time learning someone else’s code base, they want to vent their own creativity by building a great code base with others. Companies promoting sham open source projects know this fully well and therefore feel safe knowing there will be no serious challenges to their control – buyer beware!