Hello everyone and welcome back to our course on commercial open source software startups

and how to spin such a startup off from university.

We are squarely in the middle of the course.

Last time we talked about open source software as an artifact and today we will talk about

open source as a project or as a community undertaking.

After that next time we will talk about commercialization strategies around open source.

So today we will discover that there is a second alternative or enhanced definition of

open source compared to the one I gave you last time and it's centered on the collaborative

activity of people in communities.

And then we will look at how these communities have formed, how they have found organizational

structures to sustain the underlying open source projects and so forth.

So what is an open source project?

So far we talked about software and we need to understand that the artifact arguably is

not even necessarily the only, it's certainly not the only innovation of open source, maybe

not even the most important one.

When you look to the open source initiative website you will find that there is separately

from the legal definition which involved the 10 requirements for an open source software

license that turned a license, software license into an open source license.

When you look beyond that you will find that there is a definition of open source as a

development method for software that harnesses the power of peer review and transparency

of process and so forth as you can read here.

So while in public debate often this legal definition from the last lecture is dominant,

there actually is the second definition which focuses on it's how the people work with each

other, it's a development method.

It's distributed based on peer review and so forth.

So how is that important?

Well it is an innovation that didn't come with GNU Emacs but that came with the Linux

kernel and has been evolved ever since to turn the pure software into a project of people.

To be honest it's actually not really a project because we are talking about the software

plus a community of people around it.

So in my definition an open source project is a piece of software provided under an open

source license, that's the ArtifactView, developed by a community of people using certain to

be discussed principles of open collaboration.

It's not a project because there is no defined end date, there is no consulting company behind

it, there is no set end date, it's open ended.

That's why it's more like a product except that most open source software is not a product

it's just a component perhaps used in products.

So that community of people here in a real open source software project that is a community

project has to be diverse, they collaborate with each other but they can't for example

be from the same employer at least according to the rules of some.

We will see how the Apache Software Foundation is an open source software foundation that's

the host to many important open source projects and they only talk about a community of people

if there is diversity of the people involved.

So at least three different sources meaning legal entities, so different companies, so

natural people who contribute.

You want diversity among the people in the community to call it a real open source project

and then a community open source project.

This form of collaboration, the open source style of collaboration I call open collaboration

and it's marked by three important characteristics.

In open source collaboration everyone can possibly contribute meaning a soft open source