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October 02, 2006, 04:17 PM ET
What Makes Open Source Tick?
Every software company worth its salt has a stable of bright, young computer scientists at its disposal. So why is it that open-source projects often produce clean code more quickly than the giants of the software world?
Armed with a $750,000 grant, researchers from the University of California at Davis intend to find out. The scholars plan to study several open-source endeavors— including the collaborations that produced a Web server called Apache and a scripting language called Python—for insight into how to avoid the pitfalls that slow down proprietary software development.
“In traditional products, bits of code tend to be owned or controlled by specific individuals, and thus each bit of code can be on a single-threaded critical path,” said Premkuma Devanbu, a professor of computer science at Davis, to LinuxInsider. “In open source, anyone can read and comment on a file.” —Brock Read
Categories: Research
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