SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
nobbis writes:
"Mihai Guiman recounts how he built an open source community, FINkers United, around an open source financial application, FinTP. He believes that an open source project cannot succeed without a powerful community to support its development, and explains how FINkers United changed as the project moved from closed to open source. The management structure evolved and he expects new hierarchies to emerge based on merit and contribution. He notes the benefits of joining such a community as sharing interests and having the ability to act on ideas according to your beliefs. He poses a pertinent questions at the end: 'Why would you join an open source community?'"
[ED Note: As most of the Open Source news we hear these days relates to decade-spanning well established projects, it's good to be reminded that this process still goes on, and to reflect on what it means to be building a community-centric news discussion site.]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by xiox on Wednesday February 19 2014, @03:22PM
It seems relatively easy to get users to use a free software application, but pretty hard to get any developers who might want to contribute for the long term. I'm mostly a single developer for a graphical plotting app. Lots of people tell me it's great software, but few want to make significant contributions beyond bug reports and packaging it for distributions. Perhaps this is due to the type of application. Maybe developer-centric software encourages developers.