Quality Costs Money: regexps.com Pioneers R&D Strategy
for Open Source
Jun 15th, 06:53 UTC
regexps.com establishes a new business model for Open
Source research and development exemplified by
the introduction of their regexp pattern matching library.
The commercial success of Linux is not surprising. Linux is good
stuff. But is it ready for the end-user application market?
A lot of Linux projects, though they produce tantalizing applications,
miss the boat on producing quality products: documentation is shoddy
or missing, testing is inadequate, developers work without feedback
from users outside of the community of hackers, release engineering is
uneven, and the applications have bugs, bugs, bugs.
Proprietary software companies, like Microsoft, spend many millions
on testing and user studies and use that spending to steer the R&D
process. That feedback from market to developers, more than any
other single factor, earns customers for the Microsofts of the world.
At the same time, the Linux community, and the Free Software community in
general, produces a lot of software with very little tangible
compensation. Yet every major computer manufacturer now promotes
Linux. Several companies with large revenues sell Linux
distributions.
What's wrong with this picture?
regexps.com thinks it has the solution: a market-driven development
process in which paying customers, those who sell to end-users, become
subscribers to R&D efforts. Subscribers pay for an intimate relationship
with development teams: helping to prioritize development with
feedback from the demands of the market; calling developers attention
to where better QA is needed; using funding incentives to organize
separate teams of developers into a more coherent whole.
"regexps.com (http://regexps.com) is our first
experiment with this new development strategy: we're inviting
customers to try out the process on an important, yet fairly obscure
and out of the way project (regexp pattern matching). As we and our
customers learn how to work this way we intend to create a marketplace
in which teams of developers promote their projects and customers bid
for the attentions and focus of those teams," said Tom Lord of
regexps.com. "We will create a trading board for
Linux development effort. Of course, there's no need to wait for our
marketplace: development teams are free to adopt our business model on
their own, today."
(Submitted by Thomas Lord of regexps.com)
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