Its truly amazing to see how open source is changing the basic foundation of open source. Even with Linux slowly starting to make an impact on the desktop, the server and embedded markets have already bought into FLOSS.
None of these advances would have been possibly with the large communities surrounding the projects. Look at Ubuntu. There are more than 600,000 registered users on the Ubuntu Forums. 600,000! With all the blogs and websites out there, how many have gotten 600,000 hits in their lifetime? And one forum for a product with such a small market share (I’m talking about Ubuntu here), has 600,000 users. That almost leaves me speechless.
Even with the huge popularity of forums, isn’t IRC the backbone of FLOSS today? With contributors from all the over the world, email, mailing lists, and forums do not translate into possible real-time conversations very well. The extensibility of popular IRC clients lets each user have complete control, even more than email, and completely dwarfing the tools available for forums (are there any Firefox plugins or Greasemonkey scripts for forums?). Of course, the IRC paradigm is bewildering to most users, as email and forums let the user concentrate on one thread (even if it goes off-topic).
I wonder if AOL still has their old chat-room system, the same system that would show up every once in a while on Dateline or 60 Minutes to show the dangers of the Internet. Maybe that whole crowd has moved on to MySpace.
Back to the original intent of this post, I have always wondered how FLOSS projects get people to work on the tedious aspects of the community. What is in it for them? I understand why people get involved in the open source community in general. Maybe make a name for themselves, ideology, something different, building a resume, and on and on. For instance, fixing bugs. It makes sense for contributors to help write cool new features. But where is the fun in fixing some minor UI issue in an application?
Perhaps a better example is documentation. Most of the big Linux distributions like Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu have contributors who write how-tos, quick-start guides, and release notes. Its not like anyone’s name shows up in big sexy letters in the About dialog boxes. Does it go back to idealogy and believing that the contributions help promote the cause? Similarly, many people post thousands of times on forum, helping out new users. It would seem like human nature to say “My applications (or system) is working ok. I’ll come back and ask for help when I run into trouble next time.”
What exactly does an open source community engender that makes contributors keep coming back to help with the mundane?
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