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Jenkins and Hudson split about 10 years ago and the community-driven Jenkins won out over the corporate Hudson. I think it's fair to say that most large-scale
by djur 5y ago
Jenkins and Hudson split about 10 years ago and the community-driven Jenkins won out over the corporate Hudson.
I think it's fair to say that most large-scale community-managed projects are also going to have at least some kind of nonprofit attached, which will probably receive funding from companies which have an interest in keeping things going. For instance, Blender was a commercial and proprietary product that was made open source through a crowdfunded campaign run by a nonprofit created by Blender's original author. The Blender Foundation receives corporate funding and is a major contributor to development, but I think it's also fair to describe it as a successful community-driven project.
Honestly, if something is high-profile enough to be identified as "successful" that probably means that someone's getting paid to work on it, and that money is probably coming from a commercial donor on some level or another. The one exception might be in video games: open source releases of games (such as The Ur-Quan Masters) are usually 100% volunteer-driven and are unlikely to receive corporate funding. Some of those have been very successful!
- dmitriid 5y ago> Jenkins and Hudson split about 10 years ago and the community-driven Jenkins won out over the corporate Hudson. Five top contributors to Jenkins are from Cloudbees. $100 million annual recurring revenue [1] Then there's one from Apache. One from RedHat. And even beyond top five contributions are meager to say the least. While opensource, development is driven by the company that builds a product on top of it. > Honestly, if something is high-profile enough to be identified as "successful" that probably means that someone's getting paid to work on it, and that money is probably coming from a commercial donor on some level or another. That was more-or-less a subtext to my question: to work on something big, you probably need full-time engineers. And those engineers at the very least need to eat something :) [1] https://thestack.technology/cloudbees-new-ceo/ https://thestack.technology/cloudbees-new-ceo/
- djur 5y agoI think having commercial users of software fund ongoing development is a good thing and does not inherently mean that the project is no longer "community-driven". Commercial users are part of the community.