Software Pluralism

Software Pluralism

Development Communities

Abstract

There are thousands of open source projects around the world, organized around development communities. This article discusses some of the most important of these development communities.

Development Communities

In a 1976 "open letter to hobbyists," Bill Gates commented: "Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put three man-years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product, and distribute for free?" However, almost three decades later, Microsoft included the open source movement as a threat in its 10Q report released for the first time:

"The popularization of the open source movement continues to pose a significant challenge to the Company's business model… To the extent the open source model gains increasing market acceptance, sales of the Company's products may decline, the Company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and operating margins may consequently decline."

- Microsoft 10-Q for period ended March 31, 2003.

Regardless of the motivations of the contributors to the development community, the availability and popularity of the Internet enable a great many developers to join the open source community from around the world. The open source development community is the foundation of the open source movement. Development methodologies, including code visibility, peer review, and continuous integration and testing throughout the product lifecycle, all contribute to the quality of open source software.

Linux Kernel (www.linux.org)

The Linux project is one of the most successful open source projects, with Linux market share rising from less than 1% in 1995 to approximately 23% in 2004 in the server operating system segment.

The project originated in 1991 when Linux Torvalds started writing a Unix-like operating system for a 386-based PC. Ever since Torvalds published the first Linux code in the Internet, thousands of developers around the world have contributed to the success of Linux. With only the A+ code accepted to the kernel, the quality of the Linux operating system is highly acclaimed and lays a solid foundation for the powerful momentum of the open source movement.

Historically, developers around the world volunteered their time to contribute to the Linux kernel. While there are still some individual volunteers, now more than 90% of the upgrades are submitted by professional programmers employed by tech giants such as IBM, HP, and Intel.

Moreover, the Linux kernel project is very well-organized and efficient. In the core of this community, Linus Torvalds is a strong, highly-regarded, yet low-key leader, surrounding himself by a team of very talented people called lieutenants, most of them working for tech companies. Besides the lieutenants, a board of directors guides the priorities for Linux kernel development. On the outset, tech firms such as IBM, HP, and Intel contribute technology, marketing expertise, and professional programmers to the Linux kernel project.

The GNU Project (www.gnu.org)

Founded by Richard Stallman in 1984, the GNU Project is credited for the development of the free software operating system "GNU", a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix. The combination of Linux (the kernel) and GNU constitutes a complete functioning Linux operating system.

Backed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), a non-profit organization with very little funding from commercial firms, the GNU project primarily relies on the support from individuals, including some high-profile figures like Eric Raymond in the open source community, to "preserve, protect and promote the freedom to use, study, copy, modify, and redistribute computer software, and to defend the rights of Free Software users."

Apache Projects (www.apache.org)

This development community was created in 1999 by a group of people, the "Apache Group", to support and maintain the Apache web server. With the increasing popularity and expanding market share of the server, more satellite projects have been started over time. Currently, there are nearly thirty projects actively in the community, ranging from HTTP Server, web development framework and components, and web development tools, to database and directory services. Among these projects, HTTP Server, Jakarta, Struts, Web Services, and Apache XML are well-known and important components in the open source community.

To facilitate the spirit of collaboration, openness, and diversification, these projects center around the decision-making organization of the Apache world, with freedom for each project to develop its software. According to the community website, "the Apache projects are characterized by a collaborative, consensus based development process, an open and pragmatic software license, and a desire to create high quality software that leads the way in its field."

As a community of developers and users, the Apache projects community is under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation, a non-profit corporation. The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community. A board of directors governs the management of the Foundation and appoints a set of offices to manage the operations of the Foundation and oversee the projects.

SourceForge (sourceForge.net)

SourceForge.net is the world's largest development and download repository of open source code and applications with more than 100,000 projects and over 1,000,000 registered users.

Owned by Open Source Technology Group (OSTG, Inc.), a network of technology sites for IT managers and development professionals, SourceForge.net provides project hosting supports and services to the open source community. The variety of the hosted projects includes computing systems, communications, database, multimedia, etc.

PHP (www.php.net)

PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, a general-purpose server-side scripting language suitable for web development and HTML-embedded scripting. Much of PHP syntax is borrowed from C, Java and Perl. It provides web developers with a set of tools for building dynamic websites.

With the needs of embedding code in makeup for developing dynamic web-based sites and applications, PHP was created as a quick Perl hack by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994 and was enhanced greatly with a new parser by Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans in 1997. Over the years, more contributions from other talented and dedicated individuals have turned PHP into a well-featured popular language, and even a web environment. According to the Netcraft survey, PHP is the most popular web development module, with more than 20 millions domains using PHP as of July 2005. As a natural web scripting language to an Apache environment, this is no surprise.

The PHP project is organized with a CVS server and the latest source code can be downloaded from the site. PHP-related documentations and supports are also available.

To establish an open source development community, the first step is to lay the groundwork and make public initial source code to engage developers to the project. However, to build a vibrant development community around a specific open source project, several factors are considered critical in driving up a critical mass:

Conclusion

Many open source development communities, such as Linux Kernel, the GNU Project, and Apache Projects, build products across the whole software stack and provide supports to the users. These communities are the foundation of the open source movement.

References

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