[ Thanks to Matt Asay
for this link. ]
“I’m doing an analysis of commonalities between successful open
source projects… and came across an interesting academic paper
related to the subject. Here are some of its findings (none of
which will be surprising to those who have followed Joel West and
Siobhan O’Mahony’s work, but surprising if you still believe in the
magical open source community, numbered in the millions, anxiously
waiting to contribute code to your project):
- “It is interesting to compare horizontal applications
(applications used to build other software, the end user is
required to program and is, likely, a software professional) with
vertical ones (applications used by an end user, no programming is
required)…”