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January 20, 2005
The Long Tail of Open Source
The article written by Chris Anderson on the subject of how we are increasingly creating economies around the niche markets at the shallow or obscure end of a particular commodity has developed something of a life of its own. You read about Long Tails here there and everywhere.
An area that lends itself to the meme is that of Open Source. How many Open Source projects can you name? A handful? Maybe ten or twenty at the most. Those are the Open Source projects most people know because they have a high visibility and receive widespread publicity. But there are thousands and thousands of Open Source projects on the tail end.
Let's look at Apache as an example. How many Apache projects do you know? What if I told you that the XML project alone houses more than 10 individual projects. The Jakarta project has over 15, The commons sub-project of Jakarta is home to over 30 individual components. And so on and so on.
Of course Apache is really just a small part of the Long Tail. SourceForge is home to tens of thousands of Open Source projects. Sure, if you apply the 80/20 rule then 80% are probably not worth looking at but even the 20% would still leave you with around 15.000 projects.
The problem is that it's currently hard to find the correct project that suits your needs. But really that's only because someone hasn't come up with the Amazon type storefront and built that in front of the repositories, so you can search and find the project you may need. And even if the project is run by someone on a remote island on his own - who cares - it might be exactly what you were looking for to build that particular solution someone really needs.
Providing an easy way of tapping into the Long Tail of Open Source may be a business model waiting to be found.
Posted by Matthew at January 20, 2005 08:20 PM
Comments
If you're thinking what I'm thinking you're thinking, I'd buy shares in this venture ;-)
Posted by: Santiago Gala at January 20, 2005 09:28 PM
I have some difficulties applying the Long Tail approach to Open Source. Of course there are the "hits" (Linux, Apache) and lots of niche projects. As far as I understand it, the core issue of Long Tail is about an economic model, where it pays off to write a book (or produce a song) for a small fraction of Amazon's customers. Open Source projects stay alive as long as some developers have fun working on it. They don't necessarily depend on a distribution mechanism which is able to provide them with a big enough user base.
Posted by: Wolfgang Sommergut at January 21, 2005 11:50 AM