How Composer-NVU-KompoZer is a story of open source success.
I learned today that NVU has been picked up bug fixed and rebadged as KompoZer. I’m sure, with how this product has been having a tough time getting off the ground, that people would be hard pressed to call this a success. But I think it is and here is why.
Open Source Builds Momentum
People have followed these products through their iterations. They have learned to love how this works and how easy it is for them to edit a web page. Imagine this is a closed source product. The project would have died with Composer and I think more people came on board with the product when it hit NVU. As Kompozer picks it up and starts working on it there will be more people wanting to use it.
Projects Don’t Die, They Just Multiply
(Any guesses on the movie reference?) Because Composer was open sourced it has allowed these products to continue to be open sourced. That means developers that still want to hack on this can. They can user their talents to make it better. They can learn from past mistakes and move the product beyond the scope the other projects meant it for. This happens all the time. I don’t know how many times I’ve been looking for how to do things and the best place I found the code is in a dead open source project. So some of their code gets assimilated into mine. Resistance is futile.
It Shows Us Where Some Pitfalls Occur
Now this isn’t really a success, but one place that I feel Open Source has a hard time figuring out is Trademarks. Really a more consistent naming would have made it an even more successful move. That said how do we pass along the naming when a project becomes dead, or we think it has. You can’t just assume you can have the name because you took the code, the project might not be dead even though you think it is. I think as an open source citizen you need to be aware that when your project becomes dead someone might want to pick it up. If they do and you like what they are doing make the effort to offer them the rights to the trademark. What the heck are you going to use it for? They might not want it, but it’s at least made available.
All in all I wish the best for this project and I hope that they will continue to make a great product.
