Introduction to Free Software - SELF | Sharing Knowledge about ...

© FUOC • P07/M2101/02709 103 Free Software
As the size of projects and the number of developers involved with them ha-
ve grown, new ways of organising decision-making have emerged. Linux, for
example, has a hierarchical structure based on Linus Torvalds delegating res-
ponsibilities, the "benevolent dictator". And, we will see that there are parts of
Linux that have their own "benevolent dictators", although their power will
be limited by the fact that Linus Torvalds has the last word. This case is a clear
example of how a high level of modularity in a free software project has given
rise to a specific way of organising things and making decisions (Alessandro
Narduzzo and Alessandro Rossi, "Modularity in action: GNU/Linux and free/
open source software development model unleashed", 2003) [176].
Note
Some people claim that the way free software projects are organised is similar to a surgical
team, as proposed by Harlan Mills (of IBM) in the early seventies popularised by
Brooks in his famous book The mythical man-month (Frederick P. Brooks Jr., 1975) [150].
Although there may be cases where the development team of a particular free software
application consists of a designer/developer (the surgeon) and many co-developers who
perform auxiliary tasks (systems administration, maintenance, specialised tasks, documentation.)
there is never such a strict and defined separation as the one suggested by
Mills and Brooks. In all events, as Brooks points out in the case of the surgical team, with
free software the number of developers that need to communicate in order to create a
big and complex system, is much lower than the total number of developers.
In the case of the Apache Foundation, we have a meritocracy, since this insti-
tution has a directors' committee consisting of people who have contributed
in a notable way to the project. In reality, it is not a strict meritocracy in the
sense of those who most contribute govern, since the directors' committee is
elected democratically and regularly by the Foundation's members (responsi-
ble for managing various free software projects, like Apache, Jakarta, etc.). To
become a member of the Apache Foundation, you need to have contributed
in an important and continuous way to one or several of the Foundation's
projects. This system is also employed by other large projects, such as FreeBSD
or GNOME.
Another interesting case of formal organisation is the GCC Steering Commit-
tee. It was created in 1998 to avoid anyone obtaining control over the GCC
project (GNU Compiler Collection, GNU's compiler system) and backed by
the FSF (promoter of the GNU project) a few months later. In a certain sense,
this committee continues the tradition of a similar one that the EGCS project
had (which for a time ran in parallel to the GCC project, but later joined it).
Its fundamental mission is to ensure that the GCC project fulfils the project's
mission statement. The committee's members are members in a private capa-
city, and are selected by the project itself in such a way as to faithfully repre-
sent, the different communities that collaborate in the GCC's development
(support developers for several languages, developers related to the kernel,
groups interested in embedded programming, etc.).
The same person does not have to be the leader of a free software project fore-
ver. Basically, there can be two circumstances in which the project leader stops
being so. The first is lack of interest, time or motivation to continue. In this