Who creates open source software?

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Who creates open source software?

Unlike proprietary software, open source software is not developed by a single company or group of developers. Instead it is developed by many different companies, thousands of individual developers and hordes of hobbyists.
 
good artwickle. i am one of these. i make money by explaining to others how to use it. simple pyramidal synergy if you ask me.
 
thanks floojoobi. now i too can see your contribution to making sure one day its an exabyte instead of a yottabyte.
 
Over a 35 year career, pretty much all code I have written has been some form of open source or licensed under the GNU, artistic license, GPL and lately, GPLv3. There is so much that is not understood about open source software yet many of us survive [quite well] from it. Not only can a developer make a decent living from customizing other open source code for others but it has an uncanny way of opening doors to other opportunities.

As I see it, there are two types of people who write "propriety" code:

Those who are no good at it and would rather distribute compiled code so no one can see how bad they really are, and those who think their code is so important or revolutionary that it needs protecting. As the Good Book says, "there is nothing new under the sun" and that is so true of application code - one only has to spend a few hours on one of the repositories like CPAN or Sourceforge to see the mind boggling volume of new [and mostly decent] open source code being added each day.

One of the coolest things about open source is the willingness of the rest of the [insert programming language here] community to jump in an find bugs, make improvements and generally help get the kinks out of a new program. This does not happen with proprietary code for the most part unless there's a big development team behind it ... ultimately making open source more robust, better tested and better written in my opinion.
 
Interesting read about Gnome but still a bad article. The article asks the general question "Who creates open source software?". I guess the Gnome project is a good example of ONE particular open source project but focus only on that project to answer the question of who creates open source software in general.

Of all the open source articles, not once has there ever been mentioned about he biggest open source portals where there are literally hundreds of thousands of open source software projects, some of which are still the best of breed.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. OSS (Open Source Software) is not only Linux and not only Gnome.

So in future it would be nice to spread the word of OSS, especially on the windows platform (which 90% of the user on myBB are windows platform users)

For a better understanding of OSS, check out:

SourceForge
URL: http://sourceforge.net
230 000 projects, 2 million registered users.
Top 10 projects alone have been downloaded 2 billion times.


Google Code
http://code.google.com/

Code Plex
http://www.codeplex.com/

Tigris
http://www.tigris.org/

I'm a windows software developer and I use ALL of the above portals all the time.
 
Hmm,

As a longtime Linux user and [very] smalltime contributor, I take a bit of offense at the slant of the article & some of the RedHat blogs.

1.) For a long time now the FOSS community [especially the various Linux distros] has been punting the fact that you don't have to actually develop code to be a contributor, that there are other ways [for instance, I have contributed a small amount to Afrikaans translations for some FOSS projects ... no code involved].
2.) For a long time now it's been recognized that until the AVERAGE Joe out there starts using Linux routinely, Linux won't be mainstream.
3.) For a long time now [prior to Ubuntu] I have had little success getting my non-geek friends/relatives to use Linux for more than a 1-2 week trial period. Since Ubuntu 9.04 I have 7 relatives & friends permanently switch & ditch Windows. ... The reason ... it's easier.

Yes, I agree that Canonical has done more marketing & packaging a distro than "engineering" ... but guess what ... they've boosted Linux's visibility in the general non-geek sphere far more than ANY of the other distros are concerned. For that reason alone they should be respected and accepted in the FOSS community.

RedHat is a great distro, but so is Ubuntu. RedHat is the "German engineered car" of the Linux Distros, and Ubuntu is the "Japanese mass produced family car" of the same ... guess what ... a lot of Mazda drivers eventually graduate to BMWs/Mercs once they "mature".

RedHat [sorry, SOME people at RedHat] are measuring "contribution" by a very narrow rule. In my opinion RedHat has had it's chance to "contribute" on a mass-appeal basis for years & totally passed it up & are now eating sour grapes because an "upstart" did EXACTLY what they set out to do in their original charter.

Does that make Canonical to be angels and sweetness & light ... by no means, some of their fanboys are rather nasty characters ... and Mark Shuttleworth himself has said & done some things that made my respect for him drop [but not dissappear, he's only human after all], but on the whole Canonical has done far more good to the FOSS community than harm.
 
Good comments

@PMBellis

Thanks for your comments, very interesting indeed.

I am very much an Ubuntu user and co-owner of a company that contributes extensively to the Joomla CMS, I definitely do think that contributions should not just be measured in lines of code but with various other metrics as well, like language, marketing, support, innovation, etc...
 
Many business people say they will only buy commercial products due to vendor support. The support from these vendors is not that great, they tell you to wait for version 3.xx or fob you off. Best one ever was the response I got from MS "By design". With open source you have the opportunity to speak directly to the developer or one of the other code monkeys and you get helped right there and then either with advice or a patch. Hell you can even get feature implementations just by asking and you don't get billed $$$$$$.
 
any14 said:
Over a 35 year career, pretty much all code I have written has been some form of open source or licensed under the GNU, artistic license, GPL and lately, GPLv3. There is so much that is not understood about open source software yet many of us survive [quite well] from it. Not only can a developer make a decent living from customizing other open source code for others but it has an uncanny way of opening doors to other opportunities.

As I see it, there are two types of people who write "propriety" code:

Those who are no good at it and would rather distribute compiled code so no one can see how bad they really are, and those who think their code is so important or revolutionary that it needs protecting. As the Good Book says, "there is nothing new under the sun" and that is so true of application code - one only has to spend a few hours on one of the repositories like CPAN or Sourceforge to see the mind boggling volume of new [and mostly decent] open source code being added each day.

One of the coolest things about open source is the willingness of the rest of the [insert programming language here] community to jump in an find bugs, make improvements and generally help get the kinks out of a new program. This does not happen with proprietary code for the most part unless there's a big development team behind it ... ultimately making open source more robust, better tested and better written in my opinion.
Click to expand...

Sounds interresting. You have a blog or public presence? Want to chat some more about this career path you took.
 
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