One of the best things to happen if you are a free software developer is to see your code cropping up in other projects. […]
To me this highlights how thinking about free software in terms of being products (in a consumer capitalist sense) is an ill fit. This kind of cross pollination is really “the point” of free software, and would be, by necessity full of barriers if these projects were proprietary.
The problem is that it’s very hard for us to see outside of these ideas when they are so ingrained in our world and our thinking. It’s sometimes valuable to try and outline these assumptions, and become more aware of them.
The popularity in terms of raw market share is an interesting metric for a free software project as it has a kind of irrelevance or is even an obstruction when users are not supporting the project somehow. In the same way, the definition of “user” and “developer” seem a hangover from the same kind of producer/consumer thinking we are interested in finding the edges of.
What we want to know is what kind of people are using the project, are they curious, will they fiddle with things, do they blog about the work they are doing, can they translate the documentation? Most of all, will they increase the energy surrounding the work? People that do that are precious.
via dave’s blog of art and programming | Free software projects are not products.
