Originally posted by landon manning:
Has anyone had the chance to work on an open source software project? If so, what role did you play in it (ie. where you in charge of maintaining the main branch, releasing the software every-so-often, or just as a programmer) and what were your thoughts about it in general.
Also, do you think open source projects are commercially viable?
I've worked on a number of Open Source projects, and I have to say it's the most fun and educational stuff I've ever done.
In my day job as a Software Engineer, we use quite a large number of Open Source applications in every aspect of the business. Most of our servers run Linux, we use CVS for version control, SourceForge for project management, and many OSS libraries in our own projects.
One of the most successful for us is Berkeley DB -- to use it commercially, we pay somewhere over $100,000 (I don't buy the stuff, so I don't know the real numbers), but that was a non-issue, because as most of our developers are into Open Source in one way or another, we knew the software well, and knew it was rock-solid and did what we needed. The fact that it was Open Source is really what made it a candidate in the first place -- we had a chance to play with it for years, so when we finally had to choose a DB to use, it was obviously Berkeley.
Now, the software my company writes is not Open Source, nor do I try to talk them into it. I'm not a business person, and if they let me write code, I let them write business plans. However, the APIs, SDKs, sample clients, etc. _are_ Open. These are not big revenue generators, sure, but having worked with Open Source for a long time, the most frustrating part (and the thing that turns developers against you) is not having an Open API. Users (read: geeks) want to integrate your product into everything (especially emacs), so let them do it. It's great
word of mouth, and it lets the geeks play with your code, and lets your developers throw a little something back to the community.
On a side note: I'm going to start a
thread specifically on Open Source and XP (if I can't find one), so please come and post there if you have any insights.