Talk by Megan Conklin.
This talk was about how the OSS developers can be studied using graph theories, and whether such a "network" could be seen as being a true scale-free network where monopolies occur. Basically, if you think of a project as a node, and developers as links, you can create a sort of "OS developer graph". She gathered data from SourceForge, and determined that such network did show characteristics of a scale-free network.
But her argument was that OSS projects do not achieve monopolies because there are certain safeguards against it. She named two, one was in the organization, where projects generally do not have more than 10-12 developers. The second "barrier" preventing monopolies, she argues, is the "psychology" of developers (noncomformist, personal itch, etc etc).
I more or less buy her argument, but I'm curious to know what the implications are. Okay, so no project monopolizes the developer "market". So what? What does it mean for the softwrae industry? How might corporations learn from that, or adopt a similar model? How does that correlate with user market share?
Posted Fri, August 12, 2005 03:11 by Telecharger musique@200.125.28
From: http://membres.lycos.fr/musiquetelecharger
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