How large are Open Source Product Development Teams?
It’s a well known secret that (commercial) Open Source companies are quite small compared with their more traditional competitors. Company sizes of less than 100 people are common, some of the companies even don’t reach the twenties. And with this staff they need to do quite a lot, i.e. marketing, sales, support, strategy, and of course, product development. When looking at the core teams of even sizable software products it may astonish with how little manpower the development can be done. This is only partially because of Open Source. Yes, of course, it helps that you can use existing modules and frameworks and you don’t have to reinvent infrastructure type code. But what is even more important is the fact that many of these products and platforms developed are new, with little legacy and progress can be made quicker therefore. Modern software development environments are a further plus (i.e. continuous integration and testing) and the methodologies applied as well. What it comes down to is that two or three people together can come up with an impressive technology in few months and further progress after version 1.0 is staggering at least for some times. It’s only after a couple of releases when more traditional problems like the need for downward compatibility, migration paths, etc. start to influence development efficiency in a negative way. Many of the today leading Open Source technologies (be it CRM, CMS or BI and Systems Management solutions) have initially been developed by usually less than a handful people. And of course these small teams have had it much easier to coordinate things and agree on directions.
There is a downside to all of this too of course. The dependency to the individual contributors is significant and often Open Source projects fall apart when a key member of the development team leaves (or forks the code). But thanks to the nature of Open Source it’s still possible to base new developments on the existing source code.
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