IntroductionMost free software projects fail.We tend not to hear very much about the failures. Only
successful projects attract attention, and there are so many free
software projects in totalSourceForge.net, one popular
hosting site, had 79,225 projects registered as of mid-April 2004.
This is nowhere near the total number of free software projects on the
Internet, of course; it's just the number that chose to use
SourceForge. that even though only a small
percentage succeed, the result is still a lot of visible projects. We
also don't hear about the failures because failure is not an event.
There is no single moment when a project ceases to be viable; people
just sort of drift away and stop working on it. There may be a moment
when a final change is made to the project, but those who made it
usually didn't know at the time that it was the last one. There is
not even a clear definition of when a project is expired. Is it when
it hasn't been actively worked on for six months? When its user base
stops growing, without having exceeded the developer base? What if
the developers of one project abandon it because they realized they
were duplicating the work of another—and what if they join that
other project, then expand it to include much of their earlier effort?
Did the first project end, or just change homes?Because of such complexities, it's impossible to put a precise
number on the failure rate. But anecdotal evidence from over a decade
in open source, some casting around on SourceForge.net, and a little
Googling all point to the same conclusion: the rate is extremely high,
probably on the order of 90–95%. The number climbs higher if you
include surviving but dysfunctional projects: those
which are producing running code, but which are
not pleasant places to be, or are not making progress as quickly or as
dependably as they could.This book is about avoiding failure. It examines not only how
to do things right, but how to do them wrong, so you can recognize and
correct problems early. My hope is that after reading it, you will
have a repertory of techniques not just for avoiding common pitfalls
of open source development, but also for dealing with the growth and
maintenance of a successful project. Success is not a zero-sum game,
and this book is not about winning or getting ahead of the
competition. Indeed, an important part of running an open source
project is working smoothly with other, related projects. In the long
run, every successful project contributes to the well-being of the
overall, worldwide body of free software.It would be tempting to say that free software projects fail for
the same sorts of reasons proprietary software projects do.
Certainly, free software has no monopoly on unrealistic requirements,
vague specifications, poor resource management, insufficient design
phases, or any of the other hobgoblins already well known to the
software industry. There is a huge body of writing on these topics,
and I will try not to duplicate it in this book. Instead, I will
attempt to describe the problems peculiar to free software. When a
free software project runs aground, it is often because the developers
(or the managers) did not appreciate the unique problems of open
source software development, even though they might have been quite
prepared for the better-known difficulties of closed-source
development.One of the most common mistakes is unrealistic expectations
about the benefits of open source itself. An open license does not
guarantee that hordes of active developers will suddenly volunteer
their time to your project, nor does open-sourcing a troubled project
automatically cure its ills. In fact, quite the opposite: opening up
a project can add whole new sets of complexities, and cost
more in the short term than simply keeping it
in-house. Opening up means arranging the code to be comprehensible to
complete strangers, setting up a development web site and email lists,
and often writing documentation for the first time. All this is a lot
of work. And of course, if any interested developers
do show up, there is the added burden of
answering their questions for a while before seeing any benefit from
their presence. As developer Jamie Zawinski said about the troubled
early days of the Mozilla project:
Open source does work, but it is most definitely
not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that
you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie
dust of "open source," and have everything magically work
out. Software is hard. The issues aren't that simple.(from )
A related mistake is that of skimping on presentation and
packaging, figuring that these can always be done later, when the
project is well under way. Presentation and packaging comprise a wide
range of tasks, all revolving around the theme of reducing the barrier
to entry. Making the project inviting to the uninitiated means
writing user and developer documentation, setting up a project web
site that's informative to newcomers, automating as much of the
software's compilation and installation as possible, etc. Many
programmers unfortunately treat this work as being of secondary
importance to the code itself. There are a couple of reasons for
this. First, it can feel like busywork, because its benefits are most
visible to those least familiar with the project, and vice versa.
After all, the people who develop the code don't really need the
packaging. They already know how to install, administer, and use the
software, because they wrote it. Second, the skills required to do
presentation and packaging well are often completely different from
those required to write code. People tend to focus on what they're
good at, even if it might serve the project better to spend a little
time on something that suits them less. discusses presentation and packaging
in detail, and explains why it's crucial that they be a priority from
the very start of the project.Next comes the fallacy that little or no project management is
required in open source, or conversely, that the same management
practices used for in-house development will work equally well on an
open source project. Management in an open source project isn't
always very visible, but in the successful projects, it's usually
happening behind the scenes in some form or another. A small thought
experiment suffices to show why. An open source project consists of a
random collection of programmers—already a notoriously
independent-minded category—who have most likely never met each
other, and who may each have different personal goals in working on
the project. The thought experiment is simply to imagine what would
happen to such a group without management.
Barring miracles, it would collapse or drift apart very quickly.
Things won't simply run themselves, much as we might wish otherwise.
But the management, though it may be quite active, is often informal,
subtle, and low-key. The only thing keeping a development group
together is their shared belief that they can do more in concert than
individually. Thus the goal of management is mostly to ensure that
they continue to believe this, by setting standards for
communications, by making sure useful developers don't get
marginalized due to personal idiosyncracies, and in general by making
the project a place developers want to keep coming back to. Specific
techniques for doing this are discussed throughout the rest of this
book.Finally, there is a general category of problems that may be
called "failures of cultural navigation." Ten years ago, even five,
it would have been premature to talk about a global culture of free
software, but not anymore. A recognizable culture has slowly emerged,
and while it is certainly not monolithic—it is at least as prone
to internal dissent and factionalism as any geographically bound
culture—it does have a basically consistent core. Most
successful open source projects exhibit some or all of the
characteristics of this core. They reward certain types of behaviors,
and punish others; they create an atmosphere that encourages unplanned
participation, sometimes at the expense of central coordination; they
have concepts of rudeness and politeness that can differ substantially
from those prevalent elsewhere. Most importantly, longtime
participants have generally internalized these standards, so that they
share a rough consensus about expected conduct. Unsuccessful projects
usually deviate in significant ways from this core, albeit
unintentionally, and often do not have a consensus about what
constitutes reasonable default behavior. This means that when
problems arise, the situation can quickly deteriorate, as the
participants lack an already established stock of cultural reflexes to
fall back on for resolving differences. This book is a practical guide, not an anthropological study or
a history. However, a working knowledge of the origins of today's
free software culture is an essential foundation for any practical
advice. A person who understands the culture can travel far and wide
in the open source world, encountering many local variations in custom
and dialect, yet still be able to participate comfortably and
effectively everywhere. In contrast, a person who does not understand
the culture will find the process of organizing or participating in a
project difficult and full of surprises. Since the number of people
developing free software is still growing by leaps and bounds, there
are many people in that latter category—this is largely a
culture of recent immigrants, and will continue to be so for some
time. If you think you might be one of them, the next section
provides background for discussions you'll encounter later, both in
this book and on the Internet. (On the other hand, if you've been
working with open source for a while, you may already know a lot of
its history, so feel free to skip the next section.)HistorySoftware sharing has been around as long as software itself. In
the early days of computers, manufacturers felt that competitive
advantages were to be had mainly in hardware innovation, and therefore
didn't pay much attention to software as a business asset. Many of
the customers for these early machines were scientists or technicians,
who were able to modify and extend the software shipped with the
machine themselves. Customers sometimes distributed their patches
back not only to the manufacturer, but to other owners of similar
machines. The manufacturers often tolerated and even encouraged this:
in their eyes, improvements to the software, from whatever source,
just made the machine more attractive to other potential
customers.Although this early period resembled today's free software
culture in many ways, it differed in two crucial respects. First,
there was as yet little standardization of hardware—it was a
time of flourishing innovation in computer design, but the diversity
of computing architectures meant that everything was incompatible with
everything else. Thus, software written for one machine would
generally not work on another. Programmers tended to acquire
expertise in a particular architecture or family of architectures
(whereas today they would be more likely to acquire expertise in a
programming language or family of languages, confident that their
expertise will be transferable to whatever computing hardware they
happen to find themselves working with). Because a person's expertise
tended to be specific to one kind of computer, their accumulation of
expertise had the effect of making that computer more attractive to
them and their colleagues. It was therefore in the manufacturer's
interests for machine-specific code and knowledge to spread as widely
as possible.Second, there was no Internet. Though there were fewer legal
restrictions on sharing than today, there were more technical ones:
the means of getting data from place to place were inconvenient and
cumbersome, relatively speaking. There were some small, local
networks, good for sharing information among employees at the same
research lab or company. But there remained barriers to overcome if
one wanted to share with everyone, no matter where they were. These
barriers were overcome in many cases. Sometimes
different groups made contact with each other independently, sending
disks or tapes through land mail, and sometimes the manufacturers
themselves served as central clearing houses for patches. It also
helped that many of the early computer developers worked at
universities, where publishing one's knowledge was expected. But the
physical realities of data transmission meant there was always an
impedance to sharing, an impedance proportional to the distance (real
or organizational) that the software had to travel. Widespread,
frictionless sharing, as we know it today, was not possible.The Rise of Proprietary Software and Free SoftwareAs the industry matured, several interrelated changes occurred
simultaneously. The wild diversity of hardware designs gradually gave
way to a few clear winners—winners through superior technology,
superior marketing, or some combination of the two. At the same time,
and not entirely coincidentally, the development of so-called "high
level" programming languages meant that one could write a program
once, in one language, and have it automatically translated
("compiled") to run on different kinds of computers. The implications
of this were not lost on the hardware manufacturers: a customer could
now undertake a major software engineering effort without necessarily
locking themselves into one particular computer architecture. When
this was combined with the gradual narrowing of performance
differences between various computers, as the less efficient designs
were weeded out, a manufacturer that treated its hardware as its only
asset could look forward to a future of declining profit margins. Raw
computing power was becoming a fungible good, while software was
becoming the differentiator. Selling software, or at least treating
it as an integral part of hardware sales, began to look like a good
strategy.This meant that manufacturers had to start enforcing the
copyrights on their code more strictly. If users simply continued to
share and modify code freely among themselves, they might
independently reimplement some of the improvements now being sold as
"added value" by the supplier. Worse, shared code could get into the
hands of competitors. The irony is that all this was happening around
the time the Internet was getting off the ground. Just when truly
unobstructed software sharing was finally becoming technically
possible, changes in the computer business made it economically
undesirable, at least from the point of view of any single company.
The suppliers clamped down, either denying users access to the code
that ran their machines, or insisting on non-disclosure agreements
that made effective sharing impossible.Conscious resistanceAs the world of unrestricted code swapping slowly faded away, a
counterreaction crystallized in the mind of at least one programmer.
Richard Stallman worked in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1970s and early '80s,
during what turned out to be a golden age and a golden location for
code sharing. The AI Lab had a strong "hacker
ethic",Stallman uses the word "hacker" in the sense of
"someone who loves to program and enjoys being clever about it," not
the relatively new meaning of "someone who breaks into
computers." and people were not only encouraged but
expected to share whatever improvements they made to the system. As
Stallman wrote later:
We did not call our software "free software",
because that term did not yet exist; but that is what it was.
Whenever people from another university or a company wanted to
port and use a program, we gladly let them. If you saw someone
using an unfamiliar and interesting program, you could always
ask to see the source code, so that you could read it, change
it, or cannibalize parts of it to make a new program.
(from )
This Edenic community collapsed around Stallman shortly after
1980, when the changes that had been happening in the rest of the
industry finally caught up with the AI Lab. A startup company hired
away many of the Lab's programmers to work on an operating system
similar to what they had been working on at the Lab, only now under an
exclusive license. At the same time, the AI Lab acquired new
equipment that came with a proprietary operating system.Stallman saw the larger pattern in what was happening:
The modern computers of the era, such as the VAX
or the 68020, had their own operating systems, but none of them
were free software: you had to sign a nondisclosure agreement
even to get an executable copy.This meant that the first step in using a
computer was to promise not to help your neighbor. A cooperating
community was forbidden. The rule made by the owners of
proprietary software was, "If you share with your neighbor, you
are a pirate. If you want any changes, beg us to make them."
By some quirk of personality, he decided to resist the trend.
Instead of continuing to work at the now-decimated AI Lab, or taking a
job writing code at one of the new companies, where the results of his
work would be kept locked in a box, he resigned from the Lab and
started the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The
goal of GNUIt stands for "GNU's Not Unix", and the
"GNU" in that expansion stands for...the same
thing. was to develop a completely free and open
computer operating system and body of application software, in which
users would never be prevented from hacking or from sharing their
modifications. He was, in essence, setting out to recreate what had
been destroyed at the AI Lab, but on a world-wide scale and without
the vulnerabilities that had made the AI Lab's culture susceptible to
disintegration.In addition to working on the new operating system, Stallman
devised a copyright license whose terms guaranteed that his code would
be perpetually free. The GNU General Public License (GPL) is a clever
piece of legal judo: it says that the code may be copied and modified
without restriction, and that both copies and derivative works (i.e.,
modified versions) must be distributed under the same license as the
original, with no additional restrictions. In effect, it uses
copyright law to achieve an effect opposite to that of traditional
copyright: instead of limiting the software's distribution, it
prevents anyone, even the author, from limiting
it. For Stallman, this was better than simply putting his code into
the public domain. If it were in the public domain, any particular
copy of it could be incorporated into a proprietary program (as has
also been known to happen to code under permissive copyright
licenses). While such incorporation wouldn't in any way diminish the
original code's continued availability, it would have meant that
Stallman's efforts could benefit the enemy—proprietary software.
The GPL can be thought of as a form of protectionism for free
software, because it prevents non-free software from taking full
advantage of GPLed code. The GPL and its relationship to other free
software licenses are discussed in detail in
.With the help of many programmers, some of whom shared
Stallman's ideology and some of whom simply wanted to see a lot of
free code available, the GNU Project began releasing free replacements
for many of the most critical components of an operating system.
Because of the now-widespread standardization in computer hardware and
software, it was possible to use the GNU replacements on otherwise
non-free systems, and many people did. The GNU text editor (Emacs)
and C compiler (GCC) were particularly successful, gaining large and
loyal followings not on ideological grounds, but simply on their
technical merits. By about 1990, GNU had produced most of a free
operating system, except for the kernel—the part that the
machine actually boots up, and that is responsible for managing memory,
disk, and other system resources.Unfortunately, the GNU project had chosen a kernel design that
turned out to be harder to implement than expected. The ensuing delay
prevented the Free Software Foundation from making the first release
of an entirely free operating system. The final piece was put into
place instead by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer science student
who, with the help of volunteers around the world, had completed a
free kernel using a more conservative design. He named it Linux, and
when it was combined with the existing GNU programs, the result was a
completely free operating system. For the first time, you could boot
up your computer and do work without using any proprietary
software.Technically, Linux was not the first. A free
operating system for IBM-compatible computers, called 386BSD, had come
out shortly before Linux. However, it was a lot harder to get 386BSD
up and running. Linux made such a splash not only because it was
free, but because it actually had a high chance of booting your
computer when you installed it.Much of the software on this new operating system was not
produced by the GNU project. In fact, GNU wasn't even the only group
working on producing a free operating system (for example, the code
that eventually became NetBSD and FreeBSD was already under
development by this time). The importance of the Free Software
Foundation was not only in the code they wrote, but in their political
rhetoric. By talking about free software as a cause instead of a
convenience, they made it difficult for
programmers not to have a political consciousness
about it. Even those who disagreed with the FSF had to engage the
issue, if only to stake out a different position. The FSF's
effectiveness as propagandists lay in tying their code to a message,
by means of the GPL and other texts. As their code spread widely,
that message spread as well.Accidental resistanceThere were many other things going on in the nascent free
software scene, however, and few were as explictly ideological as
Stallman's GNU Project. One of the most important was
the Berkeley Software Distribution
(BSD), a gradual re-implementation of the Unix
operating system—which up until the late 1970's had been a
loosely proprietary research project at AT&T—by programmers
at the University of California at Berkeley. The BSD group did not
make any overt political statements about the need for programmers to
band together and share with one another, but they
practiced the idea with flair and
enthusiasm, by coordinating a massive distributed development effort
in which the Unix command-line utilities and code libraries, and
eventually the operating system kernel itself, were rewritten from
scratch mostly by volunteers. The BSD project became a prime example
of non-ideological free software development, and also served as a
training ground for many developers who would go on to remain active
in the open source world.Another crucible of cooperative development was the X
Window System, a free, network-transparent graphical
computing environment, developed at MIT in the mid-1980's in
partnership with hardware vendors who had a common interest in being
able to offer their customers a windowing system. Far from opposing
proprietary software, the X license deliberately allowed proprietary
extensions on top of the free core—each member of the consortium
wanted the chance to enhance the default X distribution, and thereby
gain a competitive advantage over the other members. X
WindowsThey prefer it to be called the "X Window
System", but in practice, people usually call it "X Windows", because
three words is just too cumbersome. itself was free
software, but mainly as a way to level the playing field between
competing business interests, not out of some desire to end the
dominance of proprietary software. Yet another example, predating the
GNU project by a few years, was TeX, Donald Knuth's free,
publishing-quality typesetting system. He released it under a license
that allowed anyone to modify and distribute the code, but not to call
the result "TeX" unless it passed a very strict set of compatibility
tests (this is an example of the "trademark-protecting" class of free
licenses, discussed more in ). Knuth wasn't
taking a stand one way or the other on the question of
free-versus-proprietary software, he just needed a better typesetting
system in order to complete his
real goal—a book on computer
programming—and saw no reason not to release his system to the
world when done.Without listing every project and every license, it's safe to
say that by the late 1980's, there was a lot of free software
available under a wide variety of licenses. The diversity of licenses
reflected a corresponding diversity of motivations. Even some of the
programmers who chose the GNU GPL were much less ideologically driven
than the GNU project itself. Although they enjoyed working on free
software, many developers did not consider proprietary software a
social evil. There were people who felt a moral impulse to rid the
world of "software hoarding" (Stallman's term for non-free software),
but others were motivated more by technical excitement, or by the
pleasure of working with like-minded collaborators, or even by a
simple human desire for glory. Yet by and large these disparate
motivations did not interact in destructive ways. This is partly
because software, unlike other creative forms like prose or the visual
arts, must pass semi-objective tests in order to be considered
successful: it must run, and be reasonably free of bugs. This gives
all participants in a project a kind of automatic common ground, a
reason and a framework for working together without worrying too much
about qualifications beyond the technical.Developers had another reason to stick together as well: it
turned out that the free software world was producing some very
high-quality code. In some cases, it was demonstrably technically
superior to the nearest non-free alternative; in others, it was at
least comparable, and of course it always cost less. While only a few
people might have been motivated to run free software on strictly
philosophical grounds, a great many people were happy to run it
because it did a better job. And of those who used it, some
percentage were always willing to donate their time and skills to help
maintain and improve the software.This tendency to produce good code was certainly not universal,
but it was happening with increasing frequency in free software
projects around the world. Businesses that depended heavily on
software gradually began to take notice. Many of them discovered that
they were already using free software in day-to-day operations, and
simply hadn't known it (upper management isn't always aware of
everything the IT department does). Corporations began to take a more
active and public role in free software projects, contributing time
and equipment, and sometimes even directly funding the development of
free programs. Such investments could, in the best scenarios, repay
themselves many times over. The sponsor only pays a small number of
expert programmers to devote themselves to the project full time, but
reaps the benefits of everyone's contributions,
including work from unpaid volunteers and from programmers being paid
by other corporations."Free" Versus "Open Source"As the corporate world gave more and more attention to free
software, programmers were faced with new issues of presentation. One
was the word "free" itself. On first hearing the term "free software"
many people mistakenly think it means just "zero-cost software." It's
true that all free software is zero-cost,One may charge
a fee for giving out copies of free software, but since one cannot
stop the recipients from offering it at no charge afterwards, the
price is effectively driven to zero immediately.
but not all zero-cost software is free. For example, during the
battle of the browsers in the 1990s, both Netscape and Microsoft gave
away their competing web browsers at no charge, in a scramble to gain
market share. Neither browser was free in the "free software" sense.
You couldn't get the source code, and even if you could, you didn't
have the right to modify or redistribute it.The source
code to Netscape Navigator
was eventually released under an open source
license, in 1998, and became the foundation for the Mozilla web
browser. See . The only thing
you could do was download an executable and run it. The browsers were
no more free than shrink-wrapped software bought in a store; they
merely had a lower price.This confusion over the word "free" is due entirely to an
unfortunate ambiguity in the English language. Most other tongues
distinguish low prices from liberty (the distinction between
gratis and libre is
immediately clear to speakers of Romance languages, for example). But
English's position as the de facto bridge language of the Internet
means that a problem with English is, to some degree, a problem for
everyone. The misunderstanding around the word "free" was so
prevalent that free software programmers eventually evolved a standard
formula in response: "It's free as in
freedom—think free
speech, not free beer." Still, having
to explain it over and over is tiring. Many programmers felt, with
some justification, that the ambiguous word "free" was hampering the
public's understanding of this software.But the problem went deeper than that. The word "free" carried
with it an inescapable moral connotation: if freedom was an end in
itself, it didn't matter whether free software also happened to
be better, or more profitable for certain businesses in certain
circumstances. Those were merely pleasant side effects of a motive
that was, at bottom, neither technical nor mercantile, but moral.
Furthermore, the "free as in freedom" position forced a glaring
inconsistency on corporations who wanted to support particular free
programs in one aspect of their business, but continue marketing
proprietary software in others.These dilemmas came to a community that was already poised for
an identity crisis. The programmers who actually
write free software have never been of one mind
about the overall goal, if any, of the free software movement. Even
to say that opinions run from one extreme to the other would be
misleading, in that it would falsely imply a linear range where there
is instead a multidimensional scattering. However, two broad
categories of belief can be distinguished, if we are willing to ignore
subtleties for the moment. One group takes Stallman's view, that the
freedom to share and modify is the most important thing, and that
therefore if you stop talking about freedom, you've left out the core
issue. Others feel that the software itself is the most important
argument in its favor, and are uncomfortable with proclaiming
proprietary software inherently bad. Some, but not all, free
software programmers believe that the author (or employer, in the case
of paid work)
should have the right to control the terms of
distribution, and that no moral judgement need be attached to the
choice of particular terms.For a long time, these differences did not need to be carefully
examined or articulated, but free software's burgeoning success in the
business world made the issue unavoidable. In 1998, the term
open source was created as an alternative
to "free", by a coalition of programmers who eventually became The
Open Source Initiative (OSI).OSI's web home is . The OSI felt
not only that "free software" was potentially confusing, but that the
word "free" was just one symptom of a general problem: that the
movement needed a marketing program to pitch it to the corporate
world, and that talk of morals and the social benefits of sharing
would never fly in corporate boardrooms. In their own words:
The Open Source Initiative is a marketing
program for free software. It's a pitch for "free software" on
solid pragmatic grounds rather than ideological
tub-thumping. The winning substance has not changed, the losing
attitude and symbolism have. ...The case that needs to be made to most techies
isn't about the concept of open source, but the name. Why not
call it, as we traditionally have, free software?One direct reason is that the term "free
software" is easily misunderstood in ways that lead to
conflict. ...But the real reason for the re-labeling is a
marketing one. We're trying to pitch our concept to the
corporate world now. We have a winning product, but our
positioning, in the past, has been awful. The term "free
software" has been misunderstood by business persons, who
mistake the desire to share with anti-commercialism, or worse,
theft.Mainstream corporate CEOs and CTOs will never
buy "free software." But if we take the very same tradition, the
same people, and the same free-software licenses and change the
label to "open source" ? that, they'll buy.Some hackers find this hard to believe, but
that's because they're techies who think in concrete,
substantial terms and don't understand how important image is
when you're selling something.In marketing, appearance is reality. The
appearance that we're willing to climb down off the barricades
and work with the corporate world counts for as much as the
reality of our behavior, our convictions, and our
software.(from . Or
rather, formerly from that
site — the OSI has apparently taken down the
pages since then, although they can still be seen at
and
.)
The tips of many icebergs of controversy are visible in that
text. It refers to "our convictions", but smartly avoids spelling out
exactly what those convictions are. For some, it might be the
conviction that code developed according to an open process will be
better code; for others, it might be the conviction that all
information should be shared. There's the use of the word "theft" to
refer (presumably) to illegal copying—a usage that many object
to, on the grounds that it's not theft if the original possessor still
has the item afterwards. There's the tantalizing hint that the free
software movement might be mistakenly accused of anti-commercialism,
but it leaves carefully unexamined the question of whether such an
accusation would have any basis in fact.None of which is to say that the OSI's web site is inconsistent
or misleading. It's not. Rather, it is an example of exactly what
the OSI claims had been missing from the free software movement: good
marketing, where "good" means "viable in the business world." The
Open Source Initiative gave a lot of people exactly what they had been
looking for—a vocabulary for talking about free software as a
development methodology and business strategy, instead of as a moral
crusade.The appearance of the Open Source Initiative changed the
landscape of free software. It formalized a dichotomy that had long
been unnamed, and in doing so forced the movement to acknowledge that
it had internal politics as well as external. The effect today is
that both sides have had to find common ground, since most projects
include programmers from both camps, as well as participants who don't
fit any clear category. This doesn't mean people never talk about
moral motivations—lapses in the traditional "hacker ethic" are
sometimes called out, for example. But it is rare for a free software
/ open source developer to openly question the basic motivations of
others in a project. The contribution trumps the contributor. If
someone writes good code, you don't ask them whether they do it for
moral reasons, or because their employer paid them to, or because
they're building up their resumé, or whatever. You evaluate
the contribution on technical grounds, and respond on technical
grounds. Even explicitly political organizations like the Debian
project, whose goal is to offer a 100% free (that is, "free as in
freedom") computing environment, are fairly relaxed about integrating
with non-free code and cooperating with programmers who don't share
exactly the same goals.The Situation TodayWhen running a free software project, you won't need to talk
about such weighty philosophical matters on a daily basis.
Programmers will not insist that everyone else in the project agree
with their views on all things (those who do insist on this quickly
find themselves unable to work in any project). But you do need to be
aware that the question of "free" versus "open source" exists, partly
to avoid saying things that might be inimical to some of the
participants, and partly because understanding developers' motivations
is the best way—in some sense, the only
way—to manage a project.Free software is a culture by choice. To operate successfully
in it, you have to understand why people choose to be in it in the
first place. Coercive techniques don't work. If people are unhappy in
one project, they will just wander off to another one. Free software
is remarkable even among volunteer communities for its lightness of
investment. Most of the people involved have never actually met the
other participants face-to-face, and simply donate bits of time
whenever they feel like it. The normal conduits by which humans bond
with each other and form lasting groups are narrowed down to a tiny
channel: the written word, carried over electronic wires. Because of
this, it can take a long time for a cohesive and dedicated group to
form. Conversely, it's quite easy for a project to lose a potential
volunteer in the first five minutes of acquaintanceship. If a project
doesn't make a good first impression, newcomers rarely give it a
second chance.The transience, or rather the potential
transience, of relationships is perhaps the single most daunting task
facing a new project. What will persuade all these people to stick
together long enough to produce something useful? The answer to that
question is complex enough to occupy the rest of this book, but if it
had to be expressed in one sentence, it would be this:
People should feel that their connection to a
project, and influence over it, is directly proportional to
their contributions.
No class of developers, or potential developers, should ever
feel discounted or discriminated against for non-technical reasons.
Clearly, projects with corporate sponsorship and/or salaried
developers need to be especially careful in this regard, as discusses in detail. Of course, this doesn't
mean that if there's no corporate sponsorship then you have nothing to
worry about. Money is merely one of many factors that can affect the
success of a project. There are also questions of what language to
choose, what license, what development process, precisely what kind of
infrastructure to set up, how to publicize the project's inception
effectively, and much more. Starting a project out on the right foot
is the topic of the next
chapter.