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

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?

I’ve written a longer response here