Open Source Collaboration

Open Source Collaboration

Open source software is distinguished from most other commercial software because its development frequently takes place collaboratively among many individual developers, working alone or for different companies, without contracts or other formal arrangements among them. Worldwide communities of software engineers dynamically form and grow on the Internet. Participants discuss among themselves what needs to be implemented; allocate the design, programming, and documentation tasks to those who volunteer to do them; and eventually publish one or more working programs for all to use. That is how major open source programs like the Linux operating system and the Apache web server were initially developed.

In the case of Linux, that open source development project is coordinated by an overall project leader, Linus Torvalds. The Linux team and Torvalds evaluate the quality of contributions they receive from around the world, and they decide whether to include those contributions as a part of Linux. The Linux project has formal mechanisms for evaluating and testing contributions, and there is a collective rather than dictatorial decision process, as befits the importance of Linux to the computing community and the collaborative bent of the project leaders .

Torvalds continues to lead the Linux development project. He effectively controls the main intellectual property of the Linux operating system, such as the Linux trademark, although many thousands of programmers and companies are always deeply involved in its development and distribution.

In contrast, a board of directors coordinates the development activities of the Apache Software Foundation, a nonprofit corporation that is the distributor of the Apache web server and many other open source packages. Many of the leaders of the Apache project work for software companies that donate their employees ' time and software to the Apache Foundation. Important decisions relating to Apache are decided by open vote and consensus.

These are only two of a wide variety of successful open source development models. Many open source projects are now managed by private companies that have found ways to turn software freedom into profitable enterprises , and by nonprofit foundations that serve the "public interest." But that remarkable and evolving story is not the subject of this book. Open source business models are topics for other books entirely.

Contributors to open source software can be individuals or companies. Their contributions are combined at the project level with the contributions of other individuals and companies into larger works. Those larger open source works, with their many contributions, are then distributed to the public. Some companies take software distributed by open source projects and aggregate it still further into their own open source products, which they then distribute. A single operating system like Linux, a single web server like Apache, or a single commercial product like a cell phone or a television recorder that includes Linux and Apache may be the result of many contributions by many original authors and distributors along the way.

It is not always easy to distinguish between a contributor and a distributor of open source software, because people aggregate software into larger systems at each step of the development and distribution process. A distributor becomes a contributor to the next higher level of the food chain, just as fish in the ocean become food for larger fish.

The roles and rules for contributors and developers, sometimes the same and sometimes different, are important topics for open source licensing to which I shall return frequently.