Peter Zaitsev at Percona has an interesting post today talking about how large companies warp the open source development process, resulting in an increasingly isolationist development model from their corporate benefactors. He rightly highlights one motive driving this behavior, namely the desire of marketing to make a big splash with a critical mass of enhancements/fixes that, when bundled together, become worthy of media attention. He rightly bemoans this situation from the perspective of the developer.
There are a few more factors influencing this process and their root causes are found in the maturation of the project and the demands of both users and the different groups inside a corporation. Much of this can be mapped to the stages defined in the book Crossing the …
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