InformationWeek: How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers

Charles Babcock has written an interesting article discussing how to project an open source project’s success or failure. There’s also a nice bit about the role of user communities, which includes a quote from Javier:

Many think of an open source “community” as a passel of unpaid developers who code because they love it, but that’s not the driving force behind most of the work. In general, only a small group is allowed to modify or submit changes to source code. Other developers submit code to these core developers. But most important for companies assessing the health of a project is the size–and motivation–of the group of users hammering away on the code and identifying what’s wrong with it, and how the project responds to that input. For example, the Hyperic development team spends a quarter of its time participating in user forums, CEO Javier Soltero says.

Add comment February 5th, 2007 John Mark