Implementing open source

You can see that there has been a long and winding history of open source, which has predominately been driven by enthusiasts who were passionate about the technologies they worked with and, over time, brought in commercial investment while staying true to form with the ethos that grew these communities.

With those years of effort came many patterns of success and patterns that did not pan out as well. We have seen the concept of open source applied to different areas outside of computing, including quilting patterns, the home brewing of beer, genome patterns, and more. From these efforts we have seen a few patterns in how open source has been used with a degree of success – let us look at those.

Information sharing amongst enthusiasts

The earliest use we’ve seen of open source (and arguably most pervasive) is just being able to share information and knowledge with others with a common problem. It generally is the underlying motivation...