Matthew Aslett at the 451 group posts an interesting article on the breakdown of contributions to the Eclipse project based on looking at 22 random sub-projects. His article focuses on the way that many open source communities, such as Eclipse are significantly run via corporation contributions and not a collection of individuals. He further links to an article by Forrester’s Jeffrey Hammond who refers to Eclipse as neither a Cathedral nor a Bazaar but rather a Mall. His conclusion is a call for action from other open source communities to provide similar data to see who really is developing the software – individuals and corporations.
In thinking about this concept, I decided to list some other open source projects and take a guess at who is doing the development:
- SugarCRM – Primarily written by the company with a large, global ecosystem of partners building add on solutions but not core product
- Chef – primarily written by OpsCode with a community of people writing Cookbooks and Recipes for the base product
- OpenStack – significant majority of developers are corporate with a few individual developers
- Android - based on reading the Get Involved page, my guess would be almost all Google employees or other hardware providers adding their hardware connectors
So, without much effort I was able to get a quick list of corporate run open source projects. Of course, everyone will say “what about Linux?” so I found this data from a May 2010 article by Patricia Pickett on About.com:
- 75% of contributors were paid to write Linux as part of their job
- 18% from volunteers
- 7% unknown
I think Matthew’s article understates the amount of corporate involvement in open source and the days of the volunteer coder are probably over in significant open source project.