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Open Source has its place

In his must-read article "The 'wisdom of crowds' loses steam" Matt Asay makes a number of good points:

• As open source projects mature, scarcity of "easy fixes" and heightened thresholds for contributing (as quality and form is being prioritized over features) leads to volunteers leaving.
• A handful of paid programmers can deliver better than a dispersed "community".
• How you treat your "community" is not that different from how a corporation would treat their "partners" and "customers".
• Companies relying on "community" to code for them is a bad idea.
• "Communities" relying on companies to code for them is a bad idea.

What I feel Matt fails to point out is that all his examples shows initiatives that at some time relied on volunteers to a high degree to get started, then slowly tranformed into various corporate-like structures. In effect, there is a "volunteer phase" in some initiatives which get them to market faster. One could argue that some initiatives would probably not get to market at all if it weren't for this phase.

A project does not consist of programmers alone; testers, evangelists, documentators, third party application programmers - with some of these roles you actually want a large and varied group that can approach issues from different angles.

Another point that is not clearly communicated is that there is two different perspectives on open source development communities; whether you're a company like MySql partly crowdsourcing your production, or if you're part of an community, where there is no clear corporate interest in, or control over, the community itself. Or to put it another way, If you're on the outside peeking in (possibly thru agents), or if you're on the inside looking out.

In the case of OpenSimulator, the Open Source project I know best, I would translate this article to the following recommendations:

• As a commercial interest, you cannot rely on the community to function as your development department. If you need development, you need to secure dev resources for yourself.
• As a member of the OpenSim community, you are essentially customer and partner to yourself.
• In the far future, if and when the product has matured, OpenSim will eventually need some kind of governance, and the rate of volunteer effort will dwindle.
• Key is to be getting the balance right between governance and volunteer effort, and getting a sound mix of dependencies on commercial sources. At the time being, I'd say the project have a healthy mix of large and small commercial and non-commercial interests.

Do you agree?