Corporate or personal models in open source
This is the rise of the corporate model in open source. (The CEO chair to the right is on sale at ChairPros of Orange County, Calif.)
Early open source projects were defined by their project leads, and their committers. The Linux operating system carries the name of its creator, Linus Torvalds. Many other open source projects have well-known committers or project leads.
Today, with projects growing much larger and larger sales volumes requiring scaled support, this is no longer the case. Open source has become a corporate good.
The most telling example of this is JBOSS, which was built by Marc Fleury around its committers. His goal was to build a super-star programming line-up whose help companies would gladly pay top dollar for, and to reward the technical guys.
JBOSS got top dollar, being acquired by Red Hat last year. But Fleury was quickly eased-out, while JBOSS survived. Some observers, like our own Paula Rooney, may rightly talk of a RedHat brain drain, but it has not been matched by a financial drain.
Think of it as evolution in action. Scaled operations are too big for any one person. Even blogs today are mostly group affairs, from DailyKos on the left to RedState on the right, and it's branding, rather than the writing of any one contributor, which keeps these operations on top.
The point is that leadership is a full-time job. You can either work in your business or on your business. If you're working on it, you're a businessperson, and not just a programmer. If you're working in it, you're a programmer, and at best the technical lead. A pro needs to sit in the CEO chair.
So the question again occurs, how much of the resulting pie should the CEO be allowed to eat, and what is left for the people who do the work?