Project initiation

• Software “scratches an itch”

  • I.e., solves a personal problem faced by some developer
  • Developer understands some problem domain and designs software to address it

• Implication

  • OSS projects are common in Internet infrastructure and program development
  • Not so common in business applications (though there are some)

• More recently, some companies have opened formerly closed-source projects to gain access to OSS developers

  • E.g., Netscape/Mozilla, OpenOffice, Darwin, MySQL