Proprietary Development Models Also Fall Flat

May 14, 2004 1:26 am General

Okay, so I’ve switched the topic around, but computerworld’s latest article about how open source development models fall flat, is rather embarassingly wrong. In particular, Nancy [from Sun Microsystems] says that the geek creed ‘If you can’t install it, you don’t deserve to use it’ is still alive in many open source projects. However true that might be in some cases, we should look at a number of proprietary development models that have embarassingly failed in this respect – from our beloved Staroffice/OpenOffice.org to Netscape/Mozilla and many other examples. Those projects employ hordes of build engineers, with very technical, complicated build environments that the average geek has no chance of building. Perhaps it might be argued that she used ‘install’ from a user point of view, but if we expect people to contribute they need to be able to build first, then install. Fortunately there are OpenOffice.org folks who are improving this situation.

Nancy also goes on to say that the open source mantra that ‘everyone can contribute’ is actually misleading because adding to an open source project is basically limited to code, bugs and patches. I’m rather surprised with this, since Nancy has been involved in the GNOME project, where this is obviously not the case – with contributions of 70+ translations, heaps of online user and technical documentation and countless usability advice.

I think we, as corporates, could learn a lot more about open source development models. Despite their perceived lack of organization, they do seem to work very effectively, with many good practices that we could adopt.

Comments are closed.