Money can't buy open-source love... only code can Money can't buy you happiness, but Meteor, a web-apps startup focused on enterprise app development, seems to think it can buy it an open-source community. Instead of the standard startup funding announcement, proclaiming that the company will use its funding for product development, marketing and so on, Meteor says it "will …
Linux as we know it benefitted and benefits greatly from programmers paid by companies such as IBM to write it.
On the other hand, great little programs that not many people buy, don't get worked on to add new or improved features, much.
If you build it, they will come, particularly if it's good and free.
Having said that, what is this one for, again, exactly?
University facilities and support plus education. Not having to do a demanding, full time commercial job and no starving if he did not. Rightly he built on existing work and ideas, not least of which are UNIX and MINIX. GNU provided the top layer and much else. BSD provides more.
This does not belittle the work. But it is not a work of great orginality or genius.
The incredible financial support in such cases is: no personal risk, available equipment, technical and academic support, advice and time.
Building a community is one thing, knowing how to treat it right is something else completely.
Not directly open source but I'm very deeply involved with synthesizers, sound synthesis and electronic music in general. To that end I follow a few support forums for some of the products I own (Ableton Live & Reason being the best examples here).
But quite frankly these two forums I mentioned above are /much/ more than mere support forums. Because the companies behind these products allow for users to, well, use the forums for much more besides product support. Ranging from product related questions, obviously, right to specific topics which only involve electronic music or sound synthesis in general.
And... And they /also/ allow for people to spout off their negative opinions about the products, services and basically the whole kaboodle. Sure; they keep somewhat of a (light) lid on it so that matters don't get out of hand, but in general people are pretty much free to out their opinions. And /that/ is one way to build a community.
I for one still recall how the Propellerhead forums at one time almost exploded when Propellerhead software (company behind Reason) made some specific business decisions about the way to provide new upgrades to their software.
Yet it survived without little or no moderation and people still enjoy themselves there.
Then there is another forum for a very well known DAW which name I won't mention here... The forum is kept under a tight leash and the very moment when someone shares something which could give the impression of something negative for their product(s) they're usually advised to take it directly up with support and keep things out of the forums.
And that is one way to ruin a community, even right before one has yet to form.
As such my comment: there is much more to building up a community....
There's some good academic research on how successful open-source communities grow. And yes, the protocols that control how people gain a voice and authority in those communities - whether they're established by fiat, explicitly negotiated by community members, or implicit in the behaviors that develop among members - are very important to the community's success.
See eg Ducheneaut, "Socialization in an Open Source Software Community" - the conclusions are relevant, and the methodology is interesting. (Ducheneaut wrote software to scrape messages from python-dev and analyze them to construct graphs of interactions among participants.)
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