Prinzipien von Open Source-Entwicklung

Der erste Gentoo-Newsletter im neuen Jahr bringt ein Interview mit Entwickler Andrea Barisani. Dazu wird ein Artikel der Harvard Business School verlinkt, der einige Prinzipien von Open Source gut erklärt und knapp zusammenfasst:

The General Public License under which Linux is published requires that all distributors make their source code freely available so that others can freely emend it. This viral principle prevents code from being stowed away in proprietary products. That transparency, in turn, breaks down the distinction between producer and user. A sophisticated „customer“ like Andrea Barisani is really a user-developer, who fixes flaws and adds features for his own benefit, then shares those improvements with everyone else. Such a role is impossible when proprietary code is licensed from a commercial vendor.

Such extremely rich, flexible collaborations have positive psychological consequences for participants and powerful competitive ones for their organizations. Those consequences are rich common knowledge, the ability to organize teams modularly, extraordinary motivation, and high levels of trust.