A dog that belongs to everyone...

Wed 13 Dec 2006, 10:19 AM

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by Ben Langhinrichs
My third entry for African Proverb week.  As I described Monday, my 16 year old was assigned an essay in which he was supposed to find an African Proverb and relate it to his life.  He claimed that it was impossible that an African Proverb could describe his life, but having read many in an entertaining quest to prove him wrong, I am inspired to use some of my favorites for posts this week.  Here is yet another...

A dog that belongs to everyone will die of hunger.

I know that there are readers who will profoundly disagree with me, but this is my problem with open source software.  Unless it is owned by someone, it is too often owned by noone.  At OpenNTF, they solve this problem with Chefs, but at places like SourceForge, there are a whole lot of dead products because anybody could fix/enhance/complete them, but nobody does.  As to the "exceptions" such as Apache, Firefox, Linux, etc., they are all owned by relatively small groups and occasionally contributed to by many others.

Interestingly, it doesn't seem that the same is as true of other open source initiatives, such as open source standards and open source knowledge (e.g., wikipedia).  I honestly am not sure why that is.

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