Matt Asay just published a post titled “‘Community’ is an overhyped word in software“, where he collects several observations and basically states that ” Most people don’t contribute any software, any bug fixes, any blog mentions, or any anything to open-source projects, including those from which they derive considerable value. They just don’t. Sure, there are counterexamples to this, but they’re the exception, not the rule.” While true to some extent, the way the post is presented seems to imply that only commercial contributions are really of value (as he states later “So, if you want to rely on a community to build your product for you, good luck. You’re going to need it, as experience suggests that hard work by a committed core team develops great software, whether its Linux or Microsoft SharePoint, not some committee masquerading as a community.”)

This is somewhat true and somewhat false, and this dichotomy depends on the fact that “community” is an undefined word in this context. Two years ago I gave an interview to Roberto Galoppini, and one of the questions and answer was:

“What is your opinion about “the” community?

Alessandro [Rubini] is right in expressing disbelief in a generic “community”; there are organized communities that can be recognized as such (Debian or Gentoo supporters are among them) but tend to be an exception and not the rule. Most software do not have a real community outside of the developers (and eventually some users) of a single company; it takes a significant effort to create an external support pyramid (core contributors, marginal contributors, lead users) that adds value. If that happens, like in Linux, or the ObjectWeb consortium the external contributions can be of significant value; we observed even in very specialized projects a minimum of 20% of project value from external contributors.

I still believe that by leaving the underlying idea of “community” undefined Matt does collate together many different collaboration patterns, that should really not be placed together. In the mentioned example, the 20% was the result of an analysis of contribution to the OpenCascade project, a very specialized CAD toolkit. As I mention in my guide: “In the year 2000, fifty outside contributors to Open Cascade provided various kinds of assistance: transferring software to other systems (IRIX 64 bits, Alpha OSF), correcting defects (memory leaks…) and translating the tutorial into Spanish, etc. Currently, there are seventy active contributors and the objective is to reach one hundred. These outside contributions are significant. Open Cascade estimates that they represent about 20 % of the value of the software.” In a similar way, Aaron Seigo listed the many different ways “contribution” are counted in KDE, and noticed how those contributions are mostly not code-based:

• Artwork
• Documentation
• Human-computer interaction
• Marketing
• Quality Assurance
• Software Development
• Translation

Or take the contributors area map from OpenOffice.org:

While the yellow area is code-related, lots of other contributors are outside of that, and help in localization, dissemination, and many other ancillary activities that are still fundamental for the success of a project.

The Packt survey that Matt mentions is explicit in the kind of contribution it was mentioned: “Despite this apparent success, individual donations play an important role in its development. Its team still maintains a page on the project website requesting monetary donations, which they utilize for the promotion of phpMyAdmin. This highlights the importance of individual contributions and how they still play a vital role in sustaining and opening up open source projects to a larger audience.” This kind of monetary contribution is the exception, not the role, and using this data point to extend it to the fact that most projects are not dependent on external contributions (or do so in limited way) is an unwarranted logic jump.

I must say that I am more in agreement with Tarus Balog, that in his post (called, humorously, “sour grapes“) wrote: “The fact that marketing people can’t squeeze value out of community doesn’t mean that communities don’t have value… OpenNMS is a complex piece of software and it takes some intense dedication to get to the point where one can contribute code. I don’t expect anyone to sit down and suddenly dedicate hours and hours of their life working on it. Plus, I would never expect someone to contribute anything to OpenNMS unless they started out with some serious “free-loader” time.” This resonates with my research experience, where under the correct conditions communities of contributors provide a non-trivial benefit to the vendor; on the other hand, as we found in our previous FLOSSMETRICS research, monetization barrier can be a significant hurdle for external, disengaged participation, and this may explain why companies that use an “open core” or dual licensing model tend to see no external community at all. On the other hand, when community participation is welcomed and there is no “cross-selling”, external participations may provide significant added value to a project. A good example is Funambol (that has one of the best community managers I can think of), and a Twitter post I recently read about them: “HUGE contribution to !funambol MS Exchange connector from #mailtrust. Way to go, #community rocks“. Are commercial OS providers really interested in dismissing this kind of contributions as irrelevant?