Of Bazaars and Dangerous Co-location

I often bang on about modularity in this blog, and its critical importance to creating and running open projects. Here are some more thoughts on the subject, along with many interesting ruminations on creating a Raymondian bazaar, and the state of open source companies today. It concludes by answering a key question it posed itself:

Why do so many open-source projects not have the active community of external contributors they are hoping for? Because they have been largely developed by co-located teams of hired software engineers, 100% dedicated to the project, managed and organized like any traditional software development effort. This seems to be especially true for the new crop of ‘custom build’ open-source companies, which would like to take advantage of the open-source business model. They might hope to also enjoy the advantages of the open-source development model one day, but achieving that requires a conscious effort.

Good stuff.