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Bryce Harrington, Inkscape and Worldforge hacker (as well as super-friendly OSDL guy), recently opined that gaining lots and lots of users isn't the only -- or even the best -- gauge of success for an open source project.
chromatic is the technical editor of the O'Reilly Network, specializing in programming, Linux®, and open source development. He's also been known to evangelize to his co-workers toward better development practices, being the author of Extreme Programming Pocket Guide and the co-author of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook. -Ed
However, let me point out an exception: the number of non-contributing end users does matter for software like browsers, that have a political objective in establishing or defending open standards in a certain domain of use. OpenOffice/Open Document Format is another example.
In the vocabulary of this author, one could say that these users 'contribute value' by filling up server logs with records of standards-compliant page views, or inboxes with standards-compliant mail attachments.
Just a side note. Otherwise this article is so good, I could have written it ;-)
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In the vocabulary of this author, one could say that these users 'contribute value' by filling up server logs with records of standards-compliant page views, or inboxes with standards-compliant mail attachments.
Just a side note. Otherwise this article is so good, I could have written it ;-)