Ted Farrell, Oracle’s Chief Architect, gave our keynote address at TheServerSide Java Symposium today (coverage in InfoWorld).
Ted’s remarks reminded me of a fourth characteristic of open-source–or at least, of successful open-source projects–that I neglected to mention in my post on what makes open-source. Whether a project makes a tedious, repetitive task easily, provides functionality that would be difficult for an individual developer to support, fills an key business need, the project has to be cool to succeed.
Ted also had a few more models of how open-source projects get started. In some cases, a developer is working on something individually that s/he does not have the time to finish. Or a company decides to move in a different direction and no longer maintain or support some piece functionality that is in use in the market (perhaps its not profitable, or its becoming commoditized).
Doug Clarke provided another option: a bunch of developers love some commerical product but the license is so expensive that they can’t get their employers to purchase it. So a couple of them start a project to replicate their functionality, hoping that there is a large enough community frustrated with the license to provide the resources to complete the project.