Ever since Chris Anderson introduced the Long Tail last year, long tails have been popping up everywhere. Most recently, Kim Polese used the long tail in open source to illustrate the concept behind her new company Spike Source. Kim pointed out that open source software also has a long tail: The most prominent projects like Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, perl, python and Mozilla get a lot more mind-share and attention that the smaller projects in the long tail.
Projects in the long tail haver fewer eyeballs to spot bugs in the software. This is where Spike Source comes in -- they are working to create a collaborative test infrastructure that allows corporations to collaborate on testing open source projects. It turns out that a lot of large companies are using tons of smaller open source projects and therefore spend a lot of time testing and working out interdependencies between projects. Spike Source aims to reduce the amount of time that companies spend doing that and leverage the community to collaboratively tackle this problem.
Since I am a fan of collaborative projects, Spike Source sounds really cool and has the potential for bringing open source into more enterprises. However, my fascination focuses on the long tail meme. Since its introduction, its been used in many places (and perhaps overused) to analyze markets (books, music, open source, etc.). I think this simple meme allows people to change their perspective on well established markets and opens people's eyes to the fact that there is life in markets that were previously underserved.
Applying the long tail to open source yields a number of interesting observations. Long tail projects have fewer users (eyeballs) and therefore less exposure. And less exposure translates into fewer people reading/using the source code and therefore finding and fixing fewer bugs. Fewer people using a project also means that there are fewer people who are interested in hacking on the project. I find that people are more interested in hacking on a project when there are visible signs of other people hacking on the project. Activity begets more activity.
As projects become more popular, they move away from the tail and towards the head. And as they move, they pick up exposure and hackers willing to contribute to the project. The challenge is putting in effort to make progress so the project moves further towards the head.
Don't get me wrong -- the characteristics exemplified by the long tail have been there all along. The long tail merely presents a new way of looking at these markets and analyzing their behavior. Personally, this meme helps me understand a number of things that I didn't grok previously.
What do you think about applying the long tail to open source?
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Kim Polese' Tail
Stop being enamored by Kim Polese tail (on her slides of otherwise). Anyone awake at the presentation realized that Kim was presenting only because: 1) she's cute 2) she talks almost as well as Carly Fiorina and 3) Spike Source is a "Diamond Sponsor" of OSCON so they threw her a bone an let her have a keynote. Her graphs were pure drivel and buzz speak. I for one do not welcome the "Web 2.0" overlords/lasses.
A tale of a Tail
I think you are seriously abusing the long tail concept.
Chris Anderson defines: The Long Tail is about how our economy and culture is shifting from mass markets to million of niches.
(...) The article (and the forthcoming book) is about the effect of the technologies that have made it easier for consumers to find and buy niche products, thanks to the "infinite shelf-space effect"--the new distribution mechanisms, from digital downloading to peer-to-peer markets, that break through the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar retail.
The point that you are making in your post is almost exactly the opposite. You are saying that all these niche open source applications have no chance of survival if they don't manage to reach the head of the curve. You're applying the old economy pareto principle to open source projects.
The Long Tail principle applied to open source projects would sound more like: this myriad of small open source projects exist and can survive thanks to online collaboration tools such as SourceForge or FreshMeat that enable just a handful developers and users from anywhere around the globe to join forces around the same itch and scratch it efficiently no matter how tiny that itch is.
But Don't worry, we are all more or less confused but what the long tail entails ;-)
JC