Wired Magazine editor, Chris Anderson, recently published an article on his blog, The Long Tail, suggesting that, much as spare CPU cycles drive projects like SETI, human “spare cycle” are powering the open source movement and Web 2.0. It’s a really nice metaphor, the problem is, for large open source projects anyway, it isn’t true.
While Anderson’s theory may explain smaller open source projects and web 2.0 sites like Flickr, big open source projects, like the Linux kernal, are built not by the mythical open source volunteer, but by paid programmers working for large corporations.