פברואר 8th, 2008People still don't understand opensource???
I was surprised that ZDNET has publishes an article about "Torvalds: Retirement won't see death of Linux". Don't they know what open source is all about?
The great benefit of open source is that it doesn't depend on one supplier whether it is a person, a group or a company. therefore if this supplier retires anyone who have an interest in the project can take it and keep it alive. Open source have only four simple rules, is it so hard to remember?
Therefore open source project need not die!
However, it still can, like in the case of Xara.
Xara is a bad example for a company which tried to go open source and ended up killing its product. It released its commercial vector graphic software as open source, but, unfortunately, despised its community. Xara kept 10% of the software in a commercial licensee that the community didn't like. Xara ignored the requests for releasing the remaining code, and after a while, the community developers left the project to other projects. When Xara finally released the code completely. no one from the community was left, and the project died. After that, Xara closed the software again since it didn't get any benefit from the community.
My belief is that if the Xara software was unique in its field, the community would only fork it and continue without the endorsement of the founder company.
Linux has a huge community of developers and contributors. So it would be unlikely if development on it would completely halt, because there are many potential volunteers.
פברואר 8th, 2008 בשעה 14:43
Nadav, that was different question. Let’s think, will CppCMS or BiDiTeX die if I will stop develop them? The question is YES, they will die. As huge amount of other open source projects that may die if major developets will loose the interest.
The problem is a knowledge of the code. Have you tryed to make contributions in different projects? Send patches? It is not simple to understand the code and it is even harder to continue develop and add more features.
Thus, the question was "is the position of Linus is so important that the project may die without him? Does it have big community?"
That was the question, and I think it is very reasonable. Even it is really unlikely to project like this to die without its main developer, but this maybe correct for other not so small FOSS projects
פברואר 9th, 2008 בשעה 2:50
I totally agree, small project might die if one developer quits playing the game. But something big like Linux just didn't depend on one single person
So the retirement of a single person will not cause a stop in development of the entire system, but a small project depends on the people who believe in it and who knows the code
Niels