Comments on: Organic vs. Non-Organic Open Source, Revisited

By: 451 CAOS Theory » The last word (for now) on Open Core

451 CAOS Theory » The last word (for now) on Open Core — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:44:16 +0000

[...] last point takes us back to an old topic but one that I think will become integral this year and move beyond terminology to identifying how [...]

By: P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Civil vs. corporate peer production

P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Civil vs. corporate peer production — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 04:47:07 +0000

[...] If we look at free software and open source as instances of peer production, I think we can conclude here that the most successful projects tend to become ‘corporatized’. This can happen in two different ways. The project can be supported by a wide variety of entities, or by just one. It would seem that in the former case, such as Linux, no single company dominates the process, and some commentators have called this ‘organic’ open source. [...]

By: 451 CAOS Theory » The vocabulary of open source development models

451 CAOS Theory » The vocabulary of open source development models — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:13:30 +0000

[...] For some background on it, and an explanation about why it matters, see Ted Ts’o’s post from [...]

By: Cozminsky

Cozminsky — Fri, 23 May 2008 01:30:32 +0000

I think I have an even more accurate description. How about dependent or independent?

By: James Dixon

James Dixon — Wed, 21 May 2008 20:55:13 +0000

I think the distinction being discussed here is of interest mainly to theorists. If a piece of open source software is useful to me I use it and contribute anything that comes from my usage of it. I don’t care if it was created organically or not. Really why would I? Given a choice of two packages I’ll take the one that best fits my needs. If they are identical in terms of functionality and fit for my purpose (a rare case) I’ll probably go with the one that seems to treat its non-development contributors the best as that will probably be the experience I will have. Again I still don’t care about the organic question.

Some of the views above are heavily developer-centric. In my experience the contributions of the users are very important: use cases, finding bugs (often much harder than fixing them), platform testing, scalability testing, comparisons with alternatives, localizations etc. In fact these contributions outweigh (in terms of # of contributions) the contributions of the coders. The fact is you can do the coding behind closed doors (most small open source projects do it this way anyway) or in the open, but you CANNOT harden the software behind closed doors. You have to let the software out early and often to find out the functional and non-functional defects in the design and implementation. Sure there are a few high-profile examples where a distributed group of developers working to an existing spec (HTTP, Servlet or Unix kernel) have created things of great utility. If those developers were the only ones to ever use those creations open source would still be firmly in the hobby category.

I don’t have much of an opinion on the terminology. When you look at many ‘organic’ projects what you are dealing with in reality is a ‘committee’ of core-developers or administrators that are the gatekeepers. This committee decides amongst itself what direction the project goes in, what contributions to accept, and how to prioritize the backlog of features. In some cases that committee does not pay attention to the needs of its community.

Maybe ‘Managed’ or ‘Directed’ is a better term than ‘Non-Organic’. From the perspective of a CIO trying to manage their company’s usage of open source ‘organic’ is not necessarily a good thing, whereas ‘managed’ maybe sounds a little more comforting.

James Dixon

By: (Commercial) Open Source Armageddon | Boldly Open

(Commercial) Open Source Armageddon | Boldly Open — Tue, 20 May 2008 22:21:34 +0000

[...] just too much bait out there to shut up, so I urge you to have a look at the whole stir about organic Open Source, vendor openness, the role of communities and, generally speaking, Open Source sustainability as a [...]

By: Have you ever kissed a girl? » Snoopy’s Home

Have you ever kissed a girl? » Snoopy’s Home — Sun, 04 May 2008 01:57:55 +0000

[...] have to admit that when I first saw this quote from Ted’s blog on Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source, I’m quite confused (another GRE reading comprehension?). So I follow the link and read the [...]

By: James Stansell

James Stansell — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:22:48 +0000

How about “Marketplace” vs “Castle”, reminiscent of Eric Raymond’s years-old essay?

By: Cozminsky

Cozminsky — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:48:11 +0000

How about communal vs. centrist.

By: Steve Parker

Steve Parker — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:34:02 +0000

Thanks for your detailed response on my blog, Ted. Good points, well made, of course.

Is it more appropriate, then, to see OpenSolaris as a fix to the previous closed-source situation?

Although “in truth, Sun had already made the Source Code for Solaris available for a nominal fee years before”, the principle for the typical customer (or sysadmin) that I met, was that the code (and some of the relevant bug reports, etc) were hidden away as Sun’s “secret sauce” and not for commoners to access.

If we plot a graph of open-source awareness, with Linux, *BSD towards the far left, and Microsoft, Oracle, etc on the far right, then are Sun, who started out quite far to the left and later moved towards the right, now moving back towards the left again?

Is that a more useful model to view the current climate, perhaps?