Re: Hooks

On Jun 10, 2010, at 11:21 PM, Brandon Van Every wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 12:04 AM, Jon Frisby <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> On Jun 10, 2010, at 7:00 PM, Brandon Van Every wrote:
>> 
>>> On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 7:40 PM,  <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Many successful open source projects are either funded or maintained by software companies or NPO. Oracle/sun => Java, Novell => Mono, the Mozilla Foundation => Firefox, and so on. If you give a look to the emails of the maintainers, you'll see big company names more often than not. Thse companies often dedicate ressources to work full time on these projects. As a consequence, a lot of high profile open source softwares get as much attention as a lot of other software projects. Test coverage in particular is often a field which is addressed very early in the open source development cycle (see the regression tests of gcc, or those for PostgreSQL). When test coverage is not considered as a priority, you can also count on the community to find bugs for you.
>>> 
>>> Yep those are the only projects that tend to approach real world
>>> utility, the ones that have a company with money and a business model
>>> behind them.  Unfortunately I can't think of any such projects /
>>> companies that are directly relevant to game development.
>> 
>> You're getting causation backwards.  Most corporate-backed open source projects started out entirely independent and only got corporate backing AFTER they became commercially "relevant".
> 
> Does "corporate" mean "big huge Microsoft sized corporate," like IBM
> with Eclipse for instance?  Or does "corporate" mean "company with
> full time employees and a business model" ?  That very much changes
> the meaning of "most" open source projects.  Also, I think we forget
> how much money was available during the dot.com boom.  It's not quite
> accurate to say things grew "organically," unless by that you mean
> with boatloads of money available.  Most of the web programming
> languages are utterly redundant; the reason we have so many is because
> there was that much money to be made in web development.

I'm using "corporate" in the same sense you seemed to be.  I.E. big enough to fit the old saw of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" (replace "IBM" with "Microsoft" or whatever).

And during the dot com boom, almost all of that money was going into the companies consuming tools -- not the companies backing or making the tools.

While some companies have built up apparently comfortable business models around developing and supporting open source products (JBoss group, MySQL AB, etc), most are/were not significant enough to make the technology a "safe bet" in the eyes of companies looking to mitigate risks (Red Hat being a notable exception; and of course companies getting acquired by bigger stakes -- like MySQL AB for example).

-JF

_______________________________________________
Sweng-Gamedev mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.midnightryder.com/listinfo.cgi/sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com