What does open source *really* look like?
A student at UC Davis has come up with some cool visualizations of what open-source development looks like. It's pretty cool, but would this be a better visualization?
(Credit:
IBM)
Or you could insert the logos of any number of companies (Red Hat, Intel, Novell, etc.). While we talk about organic open source, the reality is that even "organic" communities like Apache are largely sponsored by corporate entities.
Is this a bad thing? I'm not sure, and I doubt it matters what you or I think about it. It's just the way open source happens today.
If this is true, why does Microsoft continue to put up weird patent barriers to open source, as if the corporate developers behind open-source projects somehow act differently in, say, the Eclipse community, than they do when they're writing code explicitly for IBM, SAP, etc.?
Microsoft aside, should the corporate infiltration of open-source communities change the way we think about open source? Again, I'm not sure. Jason Matusow of Microsoft has argued that it does, but I'm not sure....
What do you think?
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Mozilla is going from strength to strength, while (to us outsiders) What Has Linux Done Lately?
I don't think there is 'one model' for successful open source, and that's probably a good thing.
There's even something to be said for the Google (As The Mood Takes Us) model, though it reveals too much about the motives behind it.