Assessing the Health of a FLOSS Community

T he computing world lauds many Free/Libre and Open Source Software offerings for both their reliability and features. Successful projects such as the Apache httpd Web server and Linux operating system kernel have made FLOSS a viable option for many commercial organizations. While FLOSS code is easy to access, however, understanding the communities that build and support the software can be difficult. Despite accusations from threatened proprietary vendors, few continue to believe that open source programmers are all amateur teenaged hackers working alone in their bedrooms. But neither are they all part of robust, well-known communities like those behind Apache and Linux. If you, as an IT professional, are going to rely on or recommend FLOSS, or contribute yourself, you should first research the community of developers, leaders, and active users behind the software to decide whether it’s healthy and suitable for your needs. LIFE CYCLE AND MOTIVATIONS Understanding a project’s life cycle and its participants’ motivations is useful for understanding why a FLOSS community is important to a project’s success. Eric Raymond claims that successful open source projects usually start in a “cathedral” before heading into the “bazaar” (“The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” First Monday, vol. 3, no. 3, 1998; www.firstmonday.org/issues/ issue3_3/raymond/index.html). Anthony Senyard and Martin Michlmeyr, a former Debian project leader, agree, arguing that a working code base for a successful FLOSS project is usually developed alone or by a very small group before going public (“How to Have a Successful Free Software Project,” Proc. 11th Asia-Pacific Software Eng. Conf., IEEE CS Press, 2004, pp. 84–91). The founders’ good ideas expressed in working code facilitate a successful project’s second phase: a “creative explosion” in which the product, now public, develops quickly, gathering features and capabilities that in turn attract additional developers and users. What Perl founder Larry Wall calls “learning in public” can be an exhilarating, if difficult, time early in a project’s life cycle. Many researchers have examined FLOSS participants’ motivations, but these studies often focused on small samples of atypical projects. More broad-based research by Rishab A. Ghosh and colleagues (“Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study,” summary report, Workshop on Advancing the Research Agenda on Free/Open Source Software, Int’l Institute of Infonomics, Univ. of Maastricht, 2002, www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/workshopreport.htm) and Karim Lakhani and Robert G. Wolf (“Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation Efforts in Free/Open Source Software Projects,” working paper 4425-03, MIT Sloan School of Management, 2003, http://opensource.mit. edu/papers/lakhaniwolf.pdf) indicates that motivations are quite diverse and include, in decreasing order of relevance,