Observation of the trends in many HIT OSS projects leads me to believe that our niche in the OSS world prefers the Cathedral model (Eric S. Raymond’s definition) rather than the Baazar model.

There is evidence that OSS projects are now realizing that true collaboration requires us all to set aside ego and trust our collaborators in all stages of the OSS development process. The recent post by F.Trotter regarding PatientOS is a prime example of how re-duplication of efforts ends up slowing down the HIT OSS community as a whole. I am interested to know how many projects are truly conducted in the spirit of “Baazar.” The only one I have come across so far is Tolven. Are there any others?

It seems the pace of HIT development and deployment has now accelerated significantly in both the Open Source and Commercial/Closed Source worlds. My experience with HIT startups has been quite miserable in both worlds, mostly stemming from patent and intellectual property rights issues. We seem to be missing the secret ingredient that has proven to be key to the success of general OSS projects like JBoss and Zimbra. HIT OSS does not yet have a stellar example of financial success, though there are many outstanding projects that have reached true mission critical maturity. Perhaps the reason is a lack of collaborative strategy?