What is Open Source Development Model?
The Open Source Development model works under collaboration of many anonymous developers and contributors. But practically, these projects are small and involve one contributor of a lesser number of contributors. Though, a few open source projects, like Linux, are very large development projects, which may have many contributors still they have small number of gatekeepers, who take care of the contributions. Which means they decide which modification is worthy of adding in the software. So, it is like a free market with a good check.
The famous example of such kind is Concurrent Versioning System (CVS), licensed under GPL. It has a control system, which only allows designated persons to check code into the source tree and keeps track of published versions, additions and modifications with the details of the writers.
Main Features of Open Source Development Model:
- Here the users can work as co-developers and hence, they can access the source code.
- The base version should get released early to find its co-developers early.
- The codes contributed by co-developers must have a quick integration into the source code.
- A modular approach of the software makes it easy to study and modify.
- A well structured decision-making structure should be there.
The open source software should have more than one version. A buggier version with many features and a stable version should be there to provide chance to the co-developers to write codes for its improvement and for finding the bugs and fixing these.
