The success of Linux against other free and pseudo-free operating systems is intertwined with the timing of the evolution of the Internet, and the willingness of the early contributors to embrace that broad communications infrastructure. The Internet enabled the formation of a new class of communities that couldn't exist before -- people with common values and interests but geographically distributed came together to accomplish things they couldn't do on their own.

Like the real world, there is a certain hierarchy to the order of things in an open source ecosystem, and yet everyone who brings an asset to the table gets to participate and have an influence on what's happening. As they are development supported by the community, there is no one company in-charge. However, open source communities are almost never democracies. Most often, they closely represent and obliarchy or dictatorship. Just because you show up and you contribute doesn't guarantee you a vote. But if you engage in the community constructively, it will help ensure that your needs get consideration.

Social issues play an important part in the community governance. For instance, in the kernel.org community, most of the key developers are now fully funded. But despite the financial influx into the open source community, the way that the contributions are accepted, adopted and integrated into the existing code base, and the individual reputation of the developers in that community hasn't changed. The issue of gender imbalance is also witnessing an increasing relevance in the open source industry. The reason it still remains unattractive to the female contributors is because of the existing styles of collaboration and communication.

In this talk, Bdale Garbee, the Linux CTO at HP, draws a parallel between the real world communities and open source software development communities revealing similarities in the evolution of both, the issues they're concerned with, from financial viability to gender issues, and the roles and responsibilities of their participants as citizens.