Ad Terras Per Aspera

Seth Godin talks about how smaller buisnesses are trumping larger ones by not being unwieldy beasts and giant conflicts of egos. I’ve been saying this for awhile, that smaller companies have been producing better products cheaper for awhile now. Take a look at the software industry, id Software’s Doom was written and designed by around a dozen people, and ended up being an incredibly huge seller and kick-started the next PC gaming revolution.

However, this rule applies to FOSS development as well. The smaller projects are producing the better software, and the larger projects are doing all the wrong things. GNOME has literally a hundred developers, and its one of the worst products (or, really, a group of products ‘sold’ under one suite) I’ve seen FOSS produce in a long time.

But the Apache HTTP Server, on the other hand, has less than a dozen active developers and is ran on the majority of web servers on the Internet. KDE has issues due to size as well (but has a smaller number of active developers than GNOME and has more users to boot), but the Simple DirectMedia Layer is widely used, and has only one official developer.

In FOSS, if small really is bigger, then really small is ginormous.