[ Thanks to Jason
Greenwood for this link. ]
“While open source is viewed as the movement to bring the power
of software development to the people, some major proponents of the
space say the most innovation is accomplished by a core group of
developers.“Speaking at the RVC Softedge 2003 conference here, Marc Fleury,
president of JBoss Group LLC, an Atlanta-based company that
maintains the JBoss open-source application server and provides
services around it, said, ‘We tightly control the open-source
community. The idea that there are thousands of developers out
there is not true–there is usually a tight-knit group that can do
the work, who work full time and can innovate. There is usually a
group of about 10.’“David Axmark, co-founder and vice president of MySQL AB, in
Uppsala, Sweden, agreed. He said there is a small group that
handles the development of MySQL but ‘there are lots of people who
do things around MySQL. Everything around it is made by this huge
amount of developers. So you must distinguish between the core
product and the core developers. That is a small group, and there
are thousands who develop around it…'”