“After having spent the past year and a half living and working
in the commercial open source software world, I still marvel at how
‘the community’ supports and makes possible the creation of high
quality software. At first glance, a commercial enterprise that
produces open source software may look like an absurdly small
number of people supporting a large number of projects and a huge
number of users. But an open source project team isn’t just
comprised of the people within the walls of a building in a
particular office park. It also includes all the contributors,
anywhere in the world, in the project’s community.“In the past week, I had three distinct experiences with
communities in various forms. Or, at least, they were three
organizations that people referred to as ‘communities…'”