Here’s another testament to the power of Open Source development. Sourceforge (home to 80.000+ Open Source Software projects) interviews the people behind Azureus, the project of the month, and check out this quote:
What has been your biggest surprise?
Olivier: When I started this project, I didn’t know anything about the Open Source world, at least not as a developer. My biggest surprise was to see how much support you can get, and how people can involve themselves into your project.
Alon: The incredible community involvement that Open Source seems to bring. Besides the core developers, many other people donate their valuable time to submit patches, test code, write documentation, do translations, provide tech support, express their thoughts and recommendations, and even donate money. People love to get involved. Azureus was my first experience in Open Source development, and I’ve been very impressed with the process as a whole.
The Open Source movement is based on the assumption that people want to be involved and are willing to give freely of their time. The currency in Open Source is not money but rather peer recognition and a sense of accomplishment, and I’m sure that as a model, it will be at least as succesful as the corporate model we’re currently familiar with.
And why limit it to software development? I’m sure that wherever you can set up a similar system, you can get people to contribute in the same way. We’re doing just that with the Happy At Work Project, where all our intellectual source code is Open Source – we’ll give it away to anyone who wants to use it, and hope that they’ll make it even better.
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