John Mark Walker just had an editorial published under the title of There Is No Open Source Community.

Walker's major point of disagreement with Eric Raymond's C&B is in his refutation of the "heroic man" understanding of open source development -- the all-too-common idea that it's only because of the efforts of Linus, Richard Stallman, jwz, etc. that we have such excellent open source tools out in the world (my words, not his).

Raymond calls these figures "coordinators" in his C&B essay, which is a friendlier term -- but it doesn't mean that somebody is required to fill this role, or that it is necessarily very important.

Some open source development teams benefit from highly visible, active leadership.

Other teams are ripped apart because of it. (The XFree86 / X.Org schism is a recent, prominent example that comes to mind.)

This is a theme I'd like to return to later in the course, once we've worked deeper into the issues.