The personal cult of open source is disappearing.

Roy http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/16940.html ">rubin is a co-founder of Magento, the Open-source project founded in 2008, But recently he announced he will no longer support the project.

Roy Rubin is not the first founder to leave his Open source project, which is not to say that Rubin is not important to the Magento project, in fact, the past six years Rubin is the soul of the whole project. But with the development of open source, personal worship is fading away. Foreign media have dubbed "if Linux founder Lunus Torvalds was killed by a car, Linux will also go with it?" "The author has absolutely no disrespect to Lunus, so also jokingly said:" Even if he was killed, we do not care. ”

Worshipped the benevolent "dictator"

Successful open source projects require strong leadership long-term support. We know that every programmer has a strong independent mind, to affect such a group of people, like a group of rambling cats. Different viewpoints will bring a project into different directions, and at this point you need an outstanding project leader to bring the open source community together with leadership. This leader, we call "benevolent dictator" (Benevolent Dictator for life:).

The first known "benevolent dictator" was Python founder Guido von Rossum. The term was later used in Linux founder Linus Torvalds and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth and others. Of course, there are many people who share this title, such as the Django co-founder Adrian Holovaty and Jacob Kaplan-moss.

At the height of these people, once they leave their open source projects, they can cause huge losses to the project, because the links between the strong leaders and the projects are very tight. But over time this has changed. For example, Django's two "benevolent dictators" are now engaged in other projects, but Django is still moving forward. Python, too, has the Lucene project's Doug Cutting,jboss Marc Fleury and so on. Although all these people have left their own open source projects, they have not had much impact on the project.

The open source community needs a strong leader, but now the reliance on these people has declined compared with the past. The "personal cult" of open source is fading and may one day disappear altogether. Why is that?

The rise of Apache and the open source community

The answer to that question is the open source community. Perhaps the answer is somewhat subjective, but the author has been in the field of open source for 15 years, from a number of tightly controlled free software projects to a more casual open source community, I have witnessed the transformation of the industry, but also with corporate interests.

In the end is open Bsd\apache Open source Agreement license This "chicken"? Or the first enterprise open source benefits of the "egg"? There may never be an answer, but both have radically changed the workings of open source.

Of course, this includes the need for a benevolent dictator. Without Richard Stallman, it would be hard to imagine free GNU as an Open-source project. In contrast, for Apache Hadoop, without ... Who's in charge of Hadoop now? The answer to this question is the community, because although Apache was created by Doug Cutting, today's Apache Hadoop has become an open source community maintained by both businesses and individuals.

The same goes for OpenStack, where a lot of companies are now maintaining the project, and if an important developer suddenly leaves the community, it will not have any impact on the project. Almost every open source community today no longer relies on "benevolent dictators".

Will the "benevolent dictator" disappear in the future?

I'm not saying that open source projects no longer need leaders, but they are really important. But more and more open source projects have finally become corporate communities, which has reduced the risk of "benevolent dictators" leaving. To step back, even if the enterprise does not support an open source project, as long as the project has Apache license, the same can not rely on the "benevolent dictator."