FOSS Experiences and Reflections

The project that I want to work on for this semester is Obsidian. And seeing as how we would be creating the open source community behind Obsidian, I thought it would be good to go out into other open source projects and see how other people build their communities. During this effort I looked at big open source software packages (Ubuntu, Firefox, Chrome) as well as smaller ones (HTTPAgentParser, Team Talk) and a few in between (JUnit, Super Tux Kart). It is really interesting to see the differences in the amount of people change the whole dynamic of a group. For the small projects there is usually only one or two developers who have total control over everything that happens in the it. You can copy the project and make modifications but normally it is really hard to get in touch with the developers because the lack of formality with the community. Most of these projects are normally someone's quick fix to a problem that they just happened to release into the wild of open source. For the bigger efforts you can see a lot of formality with the project. If you want to submit code to fix bugs it has to go through verification processes (normally someone else signing off on the patch) and if you do not belong to the group who works on that section of the code (or you are new to the project) you have to jump through even more hoops just to make sure that your solution will not break any existing code. No matter which way you look at these scenarios they all hold a common element, they are built using a Bazaar style of organizing themselves.

The Bazaar style of development is (as Eric S Raymond puts it) the open market style of development, where you take in opinions and reviews from people who are normally outside the project. This contrasts what was perceived to be the better way of doing things the Cathedral way. The Cathedral style of development is one with very specific set of goals and a main "architect" who controls the whole project, an example of this would be GNU's Emacs and GCC. Both are restricted with a specific group of people who can contribute. Now when first looking at any level of open source software you might think that everything is actually developed in a Cathedral way (with a main person or group of people controlling everything), but that is not true. As Eric Raymond said in Homesteading the Noosphere's section called Ownership and Open Source, "According to the standard open-source licenses, all parties are equals in the evolutionary game." This means that anyone could direct the path that the project will take, however as he goes on about Open Source ownership he makes the point that in practice this can not really work. Every open source project will be dictated by everyone. So in real world practice of the Open Source licenses an Owner is usually found. This owner can be a single person (JUnit's Kent Beck) or a group (Ubuntu's Canonical), but you can easily find out who the owner of the project is by looking for something really specific for the project: "The owner is the person who has the exclusive right, recognized by the community at large, to distribute modified versions". So right now Obsidian has (to my knowledge) one owner, Hunter. Later on in the semester the ownership will shift slightly as everyone in our group starts getting more and more input about the direction of Obsidian, until eventually it will be more like Ubuntu instead of JUnit in terms of ownership.

Tomorrow I learn if I actually get into the team with the people that I want to work with, and if that happens then Obsidian is the obvious community we will be working on, seeing as how we have already had meetings about what needs to be done and who would work on setting up or initial websites and emailing listings as well as setting up an IRC channel for when we start getting other users on our project. The group seems really interested in the project and open source in general. Lets just hope that I can put my experiences and knowledge that I have to good use for the sake of making the community better and the software more accessible to everyone who wants to use it.