CIO — It bugs me how blogging throws away one of the most important aspects of journalism: getting both sides of the story. So before running the following piece about open source, I decided to show it to the person whose work I’m writing about, Rishab Ghosh, who is program leader at the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands. I thought it’d be interesting to run his responses to what I wrote because he disagrees with some of it. It should start a useful dialog in your head about open source. Here goes:
It’s clear how CIOs should evaluate a traditional software company: You look at the company’s financials, talk to customer references, try to get a demo or pilot using your own data and business processes and find out how many developers the company has, among other things.But if the software is open source, the picture changes dramatically. The company is now a community, the references are postings on a bulletin board and the developers may not even be employed. Their motives for building the next release don’t depend on the boss and the 401k—indeed, their bosses might fire them if they found out they were staying up all night working on something that had nothing to do with their day job. That’s why it pays to know who these open source developers are and what motivates them. As open source moves up the infrastructure stack into mission-critical chunks of the infrastructure, the motivations of this community should become more than cocktail conversation; It’s critical business research. You want to start tracking this community like you track SAP’s stock price, its acquisition strategies and its upgrade announcements.
One of the most thorough surveys ever done with the open source community was coordinated by the Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) project at the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT) at the University of Maastricht. Here are some important details from it:
Personal Stats: Developers are male (between 92 and 99 percent) and scary young (60 percent between the ages of 16 and 25), though most (roughly 60 percent) have some kind of steady love interest (and you thought all nerds were lonely...).
Ghosh: The paper you cite and, better, the flossproject final report and in particular the presentation show that most developers have “low activity” in projects. “High activity” developers do most of the work, and tend to be older (30+) with more responsibilities (e.g., married with small children) and an income closely related to their [open source] activities.
