<snark>I get paid!? Wow, nice to know. If you hadn't told me, I'd have kept on thinking I was doing this for free.</snark>
Reading Butterick's article, I think he has a lot of misconceptions about the open source landscape. Yes, there are a lot of monetarily successful open source projects with paid developers. That's especially true with a lot of the big ones. Still, the truth is that the lion's share of open source software is maintained (and often even run) by volunteers in their spare time.
Also, not all open source projects are run by benevolent dictators. Some are run by formally defined teams or more traditional management structures, and yet are highly successful. For example, Mozilla doesn't have a BDFL, it has formal managers. Yet Firefox is not only Open Source, it is one of the first Open Source projects to ever exist!
Open Source does have a formal "One True Definition", and it's here. Officially, if a project fits those criteria, it is Open Source; if it doesn't, it's not. No further criteria actually exist.
Eric Raymond, who founded the open source movement with his watershed essay (and later, book), "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," does a superb job of further defining how a successful open source project functions; his observations go into a depth that Butterick's statements fail to consider. You can read that entire book on his website.
<snark>I get paid!? Wow, nice to know. If you hadn't told me, I'd have kept on thinking I was doing this for free.</snark>Reading Butterick's article, I think he has a lot of misconceptions about the open source landscape. Yes, there are a lot of monetarily successful open source projects with paid developers. That's especially true with a lot of the big ones. Still, the truth is that the lion's share of open source software is maintained (and often even run) by volunteers in their spare time.
Also, not all open source projects are run by benevolent dictators. Some are run by formally defined teams or more traditional management structures, and yet are highly successful. For example, Mozilla doesn't have a BDFL, it has formal managers. Yet Firefox is not only Open Source, it is one of the first Open Source projects to ever exist!
Open Source does have a formal "One True Definition", and it's here. Officially, if a project fits those criteria, it is Open Source; if it doesn't, it's not. No further criteria actually exist.
Eric Raymond, who founded the open source movement with his watershed essay (and later, book), "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," does a superb job of further defining how a successful open source project functions; his observations go into a depth that Butterick's statements fail to consider. You can read that entire book on his website.
Frankly I'm not expert in Open Source. I use many OS software but never contribute. Instead I give back with lots of writing and hopefully teaching.
I found this idea / definition both interesting and thought provoking.