Your concerns are valid. It costs nothing but a few minutes to start an open source project. Projects of this scope, however, do benefit from some amount of early design and planning. After reading PHK's recent rant [1], and reflecting on Brooks's idea of "surgical teams" [2], I wonder if some initial work in isolation is such a bad thing.
Or maybe the lines between a startup and an OSS project are just being blurred in some weird new way.
Or maybe the lines between a startup and an OSS project are just being blurred in some weird new way.
A response from the people running the project leads me to believe this is true. Essentially it seems they're seeking funding for their product but the open sourcing of the project is a big cherry on top (rather than it being purely an "open source project").
Or maybe the lines between a startup and an OSS project are just being blurred in some weird new way.
[1] http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2349257
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month#The_surg...