*The State of Open Source: Startup, Growth, Maturity or Decline?* Stephen O'Grady To judge by the vigorousness of the defense of its brand in recent weeks, it seems reasonably safe to conclude that open source can be evaluated as an institution in certain contexts. Granted, it's a problematic approach generally given the fact that open source is not a single organization, but rather a loose federation of many individual institutions each with its own goals, principles and philosophies. And yet for comparative purposes it occasionally is useful to look at the performance of open source as a whole relative to the commercial, closed source marketplace: itself a massive collection of independent entities, notably. The occasion of OSCON is, in many respects, an entirely arbitrary endpoint for a check on the health of the phenomenon it is ostensibly organized around. At the same time, as Tim puts it, OSCON is a relatively unique gathering of the tribes, which perhaps makes such a system-wide evaluation entirely appropriate. Depending on which particular business school text you pick up, you might have seen the organizational lifecycle stages described as some approximation of the following: 1. Startup 2. Growth 3. Maturity 4. Decline We must of course acknowledge the glaring impedance mismatch between mixed motive movements such as open source and profit-centric enterprises. Undoubtedly, open source will occasionally, even frequently, follow a different trajectory than will closed source alternatives. Still, if we may see differences between open and closed source businesses in how they experience those respective stages, it is nonetheless useful to ask the question: if open source did progress through a normal organizational lifecycle, where would it be today? [...] Continua qui: http://redmonk.com/sogrady/2010/07/27/open-source-oscon/