Occasionally, intelligent conversation erupts online--this time as the KDE open-source community tries to figure out whether it needs users or simply contributors. Jason Harris suggests:
KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesn't really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not. What we need are contributors: that's the life-blood of our community, what keeps KDE growing and evolving. To the extent that users can and do become contributors, I will grant that we need a userbase as a pool of potential future contributors. But I am simply baffled by any argument that we "need" to have a large number of people that never do more than use KDE.
Given that Harris is apparently not trying to make a living directly from KDE, his view is understandable. It is true that open-source projects flourish when people contribute code, rather than passively digest others' code.
But for anyone hoping to build a business around an open-source project, users are critical (even if one of Harris' KDE compatriots may not think so). Who else is going to buy support/add-ons/etc.?
With that in mind, it's important to remember what will make an open-source project relevant to contributors. The answer? Users. Also, who is going to indicate to the contributors/developers which features are important to satisfy their needs and encourage more users? Users. It's a virtuous cycle. The more users, the more contributors (salaried and otherwise), and the better informed those contributors are.
The real challenge in my view is in figuring out how to turn a significant percentage of users into customers, but then again I'm coming at the question from the exact opposite perspective of Harris. With enough (paid) users, contributors can also be paid/encouraged to participate. Just look at what IBM, Intel, Red Hat, and others have done for Linux.
In sum, I think Harris has missed the forest (users) for the trees (contributors), and KDE suffers as a result.
Recent research suggests that much of the core development work on open-source projects is done by paid developers. Is this a bad thing?
The answer is in the data. I just finished reading Evangelia Berdou's Ph.D. thesis "Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects," and highly recommend it to anyone seeking to understand how open-source communities operate, especially in light of the increasing encroachment of commercial interests into open-source development communities. Berdou looks at paid vs. unpaid developer contributions to GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) and KDE (K Desktop Environment) and reaches some interesting, if unsurprising, results.
Berdou starts with four primary hypotheses, only two of which end up making the grade:
- Paid developers are more likely to contribute to critical parts of the code base.
- Paid developers are more likely to maintain critical parts of the code base.
- Volunteer contributors are more likely to participate in aspects of the project that are geared towards the end-user.
- Programmers and peripheral contributors are not likely to participate equally in major community events. (134)
Only Nos. 2 and 4 end up surviving her analysis, though her data (and my experience) suggests that No. 1 is also true.
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