Re: Survey about open source projects

[Javier Guerra <javier@...>]

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 6:34 PM, Adam Walczak <me@adamwalczak.info> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm conducting a survey about how open source projects are organized.
> It's part of the www.openeo.biz community initiative which goal is to
> research organizational structures of open source projects and
> business models of companies related to them.

i wanted to fill this; but the questions assume lots of things that
are simply wrong for my projects.

at the very least, there are two big wrong assumptions:

1) that a project is a big undertaking, with a community involved in it.

my published Lua projects are all very small things, usually just the
result of me hacking some code and when i found they're neat, i
publish it.  because of that, there's no community 'in' the project.
rather, they are part of the bigger Lua community.  there's no need to
ask who takes the decisions, because there's usually no decisions to
take.  I make all the coding, but i can't be a 'benevolent dictator'
because there's nobody else to dictate to.   even so, i don't think my
projects are insignificant or even ignored; they're part of the Lua
ecosystem.  they're contributions in the purest sense, since they make
the Lua landscape a little richer without growing themselves.

and i suspect many other small projects in LuaForge are in a similar situation

2) that there are motivations to the project, mostly about
competition, or economic reasons.

There's code that you set up to write, and there's code that "just
happens".  i don't think i had any motivations to write them, it's
more like it was there and i had to put in the screen to make it stop
hitting the inside of my skull.

3) is asks about the reasons to make it open source, as if it was a
decision to be taken.

it's not that i believe in the FOSS ethos, it's not that it's far, far
cheaper to code that way.  those projects couldn't even be conceived
in a non-FOSS environment.


wish you more luck in your next survey.

-- 
Javier