Jan
10
Community is a very important aspect of any open source project. The community is what helps to shape the project, debug new code and write documentation. This is why open source projects can develop so much faster then traditional approaches to software development in such a robust way. Another investment the community makes is through monetary. An example of this is the Blender project. I have been reading a little about blender recently — an open source 3d modeling program. Blender had its humble beginnings as a shareware program until the company went bankrupted. A deal was made with the creditors to allow the blender code base to be publicly released for a one time payment of $102,000. Blender must have had a pretty good user community because in less then two months this was raised and blender became open source. I wish I could have done that for my college education, instead of taking out loans! More about Blender.
