OStatic

In late December, the Linux Foundation announced its I'm Linux promotional video contest. Though early submissions were welcomed, today is the day the contest officially gets under way, sporting a new name and a panel of judges hailing from all over the open source and media industries.

Bugs, system conflicts, and errant bits of code add unique challenges to the technical area of open source development. They also affect a project's community -- and as any community manager can tell you, developing a healthy community is often more difficult (and has higher stakes) than rogue code.

Management is tough all round, but managing open source projects is different still. Most developers are giving their time because the project interests them, and non-developers join because they find the project useful, and they want to share their enthusiasm. But a community not being any one remotely homogenous group means that passions sometimes run high, and it's not always easy to keep a project's community -- it's life -- moving forward.

It may have just gotten easier. Ubuntu's Community Manager, Jono Bacon, announced his upcoming book, The Art of Community will be available later this year.

Open source software is inextricably tied to the idea of giving it away. Projects open their code for a number of reasons -- to better the codebase, or to allow others to bend an application to their own needs. Maybe the reasons are entirely altruistic, or maybe the altruism is the happy side effect of more project-centric decisions.

Of course, the open source approach doesn't just help code, or simply act as the framework for strong applications. The desired end result of any application is to improve the life of the user in some way. It sounds like hyperbole, perhaps, but if an application isn't making work in some way easier (or play more fun), it's not an application you'd want to use again.