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Open Source Software Project Management

In this paper, the essential characteristics of software development projects in the open source environment are described. This model of freely distributed, highly decentralized, democratic software development with little management hierarchy, overhead, or salary compensation has made a revolution in the software industry. These open source projects, like typical commercial software projects, make extensive use of project management techniques. While we can apply many of the traditional project management techniques to this space, we must also adjust these practices to best leverage off and support the free will and uniqueness of the willing contributors. This paper describes some of the different aspects of project management in the open source software environment. What are particularly interesting are how these large, very successful projects are currently managed and the steps that I suggest to improve these projects’ management and development cycle to better compete against or even complement their commercial counterparts.