What prosthetic-arm engineering is learning from open source, crowdsourcing, and the video-game industry

Free and open source software has come a long way toward widespread acceptance over the years, and that can be attributed in no small part to the strength and dedication of the community behind it. Only through growing and nurturing this community can open source software thrive in the future, writes LinuxInsider columnist Jeremiah T. Gray.

There are a vast number of fantastic open source projects out there, though for every one that is widely adopted, there are many that remain cloaked in relative obscurity. How can the open source development model best be leveraged to take advantage of community feedback, ideas, and testing, and ultimately gather code contributions?

The methodologies of Open Source are not owned or guided by any one person. The closest thing we have are the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and support of the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The OSI certifies what qualifies as an open source license.

The European Union funded FLOSSCom research project is investigating Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) communities as learning environments. The project aims to identify principles of FLOSS communities that could be transferred to educational settings, e.g. how the community model could help to improve education.

Most software developers have little interest in entrepreneurship, but an open-source software project will survive and thrive only by delivering value into a market (users) with business partners (contributors) and against competitors (other open and closed source software). If you want to run a successful open-source project, it helps if you consider the key questions that apply when defining a commercial business model. I'll expand on Chesbrough's and Rosenbloom's list of 6 themes to demonstrate why.

When using open-source software, businesses usually choose between a free, community-supported version of an application or a fee-based enterprise version that includes support, service, updates and other features.

I’ve talked in the past about a number of “open source” business models. There’s the MySQL “dual license” model, where all the software is available under an open license but a proprietary license can be purchased.

It’s free (libre) software that we all love to use. We love it because it works, because it’s open source and because it encompasses ideologies that many of us support and believe in. But what happens when these ideologies clash with the wider world? Free and open source software has very unique goals.