s swami wrote:
[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html
And now for a completely off-topic note, Joel in the article shares my healthy disregard for many online journalists[1]: <quote> "... with the imbecile business journalists dripping with glee as they copy each other's stories: "Peer To Peer: Dead!" </quote>
I've said this once; though not nearly as well.
I still often read: " ... open source software, written by programmers in their spare time and made freely available blah ..."
Counterexample: OpenOffice.Org "Sun is still the largest contributor to the project with some 50 developers in Germany, followed by Novell with about 10 contributors, and only four active community developers."[2] | |___ even took me by surprise.
[1] Not worth a new thread sorry. [2] http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;1530132226;fp;2;fpid;1
Sid.
Then given your, quote: "Healthy disregard for many online journalists" It would be a good idea to disregard the prattlings and misquotations of the Aussie press. Methinks they were simply overwhelmed to be able to corner Simon at the OOo Miniconf that was part of LCA 05. This is a quote of a mail on the OOo Marketing list from OOo Community Manager, Louis Suarez-Potts responding to his being misquoted: "The nunber of those granted commit access can be approximated by going here and counting: <http://www.openoffice.org/copyright/copyrightapproved.html> Not all who have signed the forms are developers and not all have commit access, but they do line up. We also list companies; you'll notice quite a few. In fact, if the media want information as to which companies are working with OOo, they can always go to this page. What are these persons and companies doing? Many are doing coding, many localization, many porting; and many web stuff, which also requires commit access. You'll probably recognize a some of the names there. I think the last time I counted the number was about 500, and that was 6 months ago." Of course not all are coders, there are marketing people, Documentation writers, Web designers, QA people, testers etc, but also that list doesn't count the number of community people working on it without commit access or those working on Ximian OpenOffice. Having said all that, the article is right in part, Sun is still the biggest contributor by far, IBM have used the code to create Workplace and we haven't seen zip from them and the project still needs coders, if only to keep up with the RFEs that keep coming in from users. However even without the enhancements, OOo 2.0 will still be making MS look to it's laurels. Cheers Yo