Just what value does “community” provide, anyway?
Posted by: admin in Business and PoliticsPierre advocates that dual-licensing hurts community. Jonathan Schwartz boasts that Java has the world’s largest community. MySQL and Sun retreat (a little) from plans to offer shut extensions to the MySQL database because the community gods get angry.
What, exactly, is this “community?” Who gave it so much power? And why do we care about it?
As we’ll be discussing on Monday at Sun’s Community One conference (note the name?), companies are judged as good or bad based on the strength of their communities. But what is a company’s community? In one breath we assume community relates to the number of outside developers that contribute to a project. In the other breath (as Schwartz does in the link above) we recommend that community is all about the gross number of users of a project.
Which is it? Does it matter?
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