Influence And Contribution

The transience, or rather the potential transience, of relationships is perhaps the single most daunting task facing a new project. What will persuade all these people to stick together long enough to produce something useful? The answer to that question is complex enough to occupy the rest of this book, but if it had to be expressed in one sentence, it would be this:

People should feel that their connection to a project, and influence over it, is directly proportional to their contributions.

No class of developers, or potential developers, should ever feel discounted or discriminated against for non-technical reasons. Clearly, projects with corporate sponsorship and/or salaried developers need to be especially careful in this regard, as Chapter 5 discusses in detail.

— Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software

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