Community is what keeps open source alive

Last week I blogged about Bob Waldie and his work on bringing the open source model to hardware. A reader left an interesting comment exploring the difference between a public communication protocol and open source.  Bob replied with an important point. He acknowledges that open standards are critical, but in the end don't provide the same base for innovation that you get with the open source model. As Bob puts is, "we often forget that the key to such open source projects being of value is not that the source information is openly available, nor that the code is licensed for public use. These projects actually succeeded, because they built a community of developers. They removed the dependency on individual developers. And they built a community of users, allowing the project to evolve to deliver robust useful open source tools.  So really notions like GPL only take on substance when a project succeeds in creating a "public"- and most open source projects fail in this regard."

Bob makes a good point - it's not the access to the code that matters the most in creating a solid open source project. No open source project can succeed without a living, breathing community of users and developers who are interested in its evolution.

Heed also his warning that most open source projects fail to create a robust community. Just because a big name re-licenses a product doesn't make it an automatic success. It may be too little, too late.  And don't go looking for replacement applications on Sourceforge willy-nilly (that's not what it's there for). You need to know some history of the project first.  This should be no surprise. You wouldn't buy a proprietary project from a company that weren't sure about either. So do your research (or let someone else do it for you) and choose those projects with a robust community of users and developers - it's the best way to ensure that the code will be robust in the future.