The Economist Covers Open Source

Posted on March 20, 2006
Filed Under Open Source |

The Economist has a special report feature covering open source software. The main thrust of the piece is that oss is a force but also has it’s own vulnerabilities.

There are some contradictions in the article, like how they state that open source is primarily driven by volunteers and anyone can edit or add code. However, this is clearly not the case, as is evidenced by their own examples.

“Today, the Mozilla Foundation manages the code and employs a dozen full-time developers.” where… “there are around 400 contributors trusted to offer code into the source tree, usually after a two-stage review.” and later they look at MySQL… “When it comes to the software itself, the company is very much in charge. It rarely accepts code from outside developers”

This sounds to me like a traditional software product management process.

The tail half of the article focused heavily on what customers are doing with open source, which is a very interesting and valuable perspective. Despite the contradictions in this article, it is worth reading.

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