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- free software community
- definition of free software
- requires source code access
- everybody can make modifications
- everybody can redistribute
- diverse
- any individual can contribute
- no formal membership
- international
- the internet boosted free software development
- very common to have developers from all continents in one project
- development process
- rough concensus and running code
- decisions made by technical most skilled people
- reputation-based
- important to have good reputation as business
- direct communication between developers, no manager-meets-manager situation
- email
- mailing lists
- not driven by size of a target market (yes, I'm running GNU/Linux on Apple/PPC and Sun/Ultrasparc hardware, of course!)
- release often, release early
- people / groups involved
- depends on size of project
- small projects often one-man show
- bigger projects have groups/subgroups
- maintainer
- core team / steering committee
- subsystem maintainers
- developer community
- user community
- motivations for developers to participate
- gaining development experience
- solving problems they encounter on their systems
- fighting for free software as ideology (religion?)
- gaining reputation (much like scientific community)
- work in a creative environment with skilled people and no managers ;)
- FOSS community likes
- generic solutions
- portable code
- vendor-indepent architecture
- clean code (coding style!)
- open standards
- technical documentation
(remember the times where a 9-dot-matrix printer came with 300pages of documentation?)
- raw hardware, no bundle of hardware and application sold as solution
- FOSS community dislikes
- monopolistic structures
- intel-centrism
- closed 'industry forums' with rediculous fees
- Infiniband
- SD Card Association
- standard documents that cost redicolous fees
- see above
- NDA's, if they prevent free software
- solutions, like 'e-mail buttons' at scanners
- weak points
- often way behind schedule (if there is any)
- always too late (development starts when there is a need, rather when marketing predicts a requirement)
- often a lack of (good) documentation
- strong in infrastructure (operating system, networking), but weak in end-user apps
practical issues:
- modification to existing project _need to be submitted upstream_
- if you develop something out of tree, you create a fork
- development of your upstream tree proceeds at high speed
- at some point, they can get too out-of-sync to make an easy merge
- submission may be rejected in first round
- cleanups needed, coordination with upstream project
- code finally gets included
- no further maintainance, kernel developers will modify it in case
API's change
- binary-only linux applications / drivers DON'T COUNT!
- you will never cover all platforms
- different cpu architecture / endianness
- different kernel versions
- different distibutions
- different library environment
- what about FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and all the other free OS's?
- the community lives by source code modification
- either publish source code or documentation, but no binary crap
- offload at least part of your support to the community
- have support staff use public mailinglist where
- much more communication
- it's not a producer/consumer model, but cooperative!
- you don't have to work
- before you start implementation, talk to project maintainers
- it's likely that someone has tried a similar thing before
- it's likely that project maintainers have already an idea how to implement your feature
- avoid hazzles when later merging the code back upstream
- if there is a standard interface, use it instead of inventing your own
- if the standard interface is insufficient, you can actually change the API, rather than working around it
- show your support for the community
- by visibly contributing to the project (discussion on lists, code, ..)
- by funding developer meetings
- by making cheap hardware offers for developers
- by contracting or even hiring developers from the community
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