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Where Insanity Thrives… Still

I came across an interesting concept the other day of a developer of an open source project who was developing the project “behind the scenes” with out any feedback to the community, now this stuck me as odd while first reading there comments about what they were doing.

What had happened in this case was the developer wasn’t happy with being pushed in any particular direction on there project so they had stopped openly advertising what they were doing on the project, with out stopping other people from using there code, this is where i came up with the concept of Open Source Vs Open development.

When most people think of open source the link these two concepts  of not only having the source code available but also being directly involved in the development cycle of the project through bug reports, submitting code patches etc, and most project this is how they are run, however in this case it was no longer occurring as the developer had no wish to implement new features and was more focused on maintaining it and fixing bugs at there own pace.

my question to you is have you come across a case of open source but not open development? do you think there is a place where this makes sense for a project to be developed with this methodology? or should all open source projects also employ open development?


One Comment

  1. Ben Boyter says:

    A few examples I can come up with,

    MySQL
    Microsoft MVC (or most things in codeplex sadly)

    As for is it better…. read the below.

    http://rfrost.people.si.umich.edu/courses/SI110/readings/IntellecProp/Cathedral-Bazaar.pdf

    BTW you might want to look into Open Source vs Free Software. Personally I don’t like the term Open Source. Not because I am a Stallman zelot, but because its ambigious.

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