Reply to post: Recommendations based on Best Practices

Don't touch this! Seven types of open source to dance away from

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Recommendations based on Best Practices

0. Look for a clear, unified architectural vision. Often this in turn means a single person represents the vision -- Spring, Rails, Linux of course; sometimes it can come from a small, close-knit group -- when Eclipse was just an IDE, it came out of a very small group of like-minded people. And sometimes it can come from a single vendor, but that's more complicated...

Antipattern: a bunch of vendors pool some technologies, but nobody is clearly driving.

1. Motivation matters. It's often the case that strong successful projects represent some group of people's desire for something that they themselves need. So naturally they will do a good job. Git and Spring (again) come to mind. Of course, this only works well if what you want is aligned with what the founders want; and the big danger is that the project will plateau once it meets the founders' needs.

Antipattern: weak vendors banding together to try to create an "open" alternative to a market leader that is crushing them commercially

2. Community building & binding. One of the hallmarks of a thriving open source community is that it finds way for people at various levels of technical sophistication to contribute, without necessarily understanding all the code. That can be through subprojects that are well contained; or extension points; or APIs / automation points; etc. (Even somebody like me who hasn't coded professionally for years was able to contribute to Linux by finding and fixing a build script bug; or to Puppet by testing and critiquing the Intro Labs. The broader a project can make the base of the pyramid, the more likely it is to succeed. Apache Mods is one of the best early examples of this.

Antipattern: the code is a monolithic mess that is nominally open but effectively closed to anybody but a career developer paid to contribute to it.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon