A 'proprietary' Linux would have cost $1 trillion & 8,000 person-years

As CTO at open source Business Intelligence (BI) products company Pentaho, James Dixon is responsible for the firm’s architecture and technology roadmap.

Download this free guide

The future of UK tech: Cloudy with a chance of Artificial Intelligence

The forecast for the future is in and, in typical British fashion, it looks like it's going to be cloudy. Our IT Priorities survey has revealed that organisations are planning on making the most of the cloud in the future. Download our IT Priorities results for more insights into where the IT industry is going.

Start Download

• Corporate E-mail Address:

  You forgot to provide an Email Address.

  This email address doesn’t appear to be valid.

  This email address is already registered. Please login.

  You have exceeded the maximum character limit.

  Please provide a Corporate E-mail Address.

• • I agree to TechTarget’s Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and the transfer of my information to the United States for processing to provide me with relevant information as described in our Privacy Policy.

  Please check the box if you want to proceed.

• • I agree to my information being processed by TechTarget and its Partners to contact me via phone, email, or other means regarding information relevant to my professional interests. I may unsubscribe at any time.

  Please check the box if you want to proceed.

By submitting my Email address I confirm that I have read and accepted the Terms of Use and Declaration of Consent.

He also appears to be responsible for personally authoring some of Pentaho’s technical wiki pages, which is (arguably) only right and proper isn’t it?

Dixon notes on the OpenScrum/Home page section that open source as a movement in the software realm is successful and growing rapidly.

Freshmeat is tasty

SourceForge.net alone hosts over 450,567 open source projects and has over 1.6 million registered users (plus 678,888 developers and 125 million downloads per month) and Freshmeat (a sister site to SourceForge) has over 40,000 projects.

“The Linux source code is estimated to be over 30 millions lines of code which, using conventional methods, would have taken almost 8,000 person years at a cost of over $1 trillion (Wheeler),” writes Dixon.

He argues that the “productivity and momentum” of open source has been attained using a set of generally-accepted principles and philosophies that are able to produce high-quality software – and that exactly how and to what extent these principles are applied is up to the creators and administrators of each open source project.

But not all open source is the same

“Newcomers to the world of open source are expected to educate themselves on the general principles and etiquette of participating in each specific project. There is a high degree of variability in the tone, leadership, procedures, and development technologies across open source projects,” writes Dixon.

NOT a methodology, open source is a guiding philosophy

He concludes, “The principles of open source are exactly that, a set of guiding philosophies. They are not, as some represent them to be, a software development methodology. Given the tangible outputs that the open source movement has created so far it is surprising that, comprised as it is of very vocal and creative people, it has not noticeably settled on, nor even proposed, a well-defined methodology for developing open source software.”

Indeed, Dixon questions the facts i.e. given its success and history why is there no accepted open source software development methodology he asks.