marți, 1 februarie 2011

Marketing, Organization, and Financing

Unlike other companies that have a focused manner of development, the open source is less clear-cut. There are mature open source products that perform product marketing, but most of them have no global planning authority. This is justified by the fact that open source is not a business, but an entire business, which moulds to the market itself. The product marketing for the global open source community operates in the way a capitalist nation operates its economy, rather than the way a company plans its products.

Networks of programmers can be formed via the Internet. They can create large and complex software products, and the team increases progressively according to the phase of the development. Software is extremely modular by nature, and thus many people can work on different segments of the software, almost autonomously, if they agree how to share tasks. A good example would be the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution. This system includes more than 16,000 software packages maintained by over 1,000 volunteer developers worldwide.

Open source is funded directly or indirectly as a cost-centre item by the companies that need it. This software is developed in order to use it for other activities, which are the ones that bring profit to the business, so the cost of development is less important than the future use of the software. Such contributors are willing to invest in this kind of project because it allows them to spend less on their cost centers by distributing the cost and risk among many collaborators.