News of a new Linux graphics-server project called "Wayland" crossed my desk this morning. It got me thinking: are "big-box" open source vendors going to make individual programmers irrelevant?

First, the project itself. Go check out the Phoronix.com article for the technical details; they're fascinating enough on their own merit. Its creator, Kristian Høgsberg, is a Red Hat engineer, and I've seen a number of other such projects being spawned under the direct or indirect sponsorship of equally big open source outfits. So what will the future of open source be like if companies like Red Hat -- open source incubators, if you will -- become the major source of this kind of innovation?

First, I don't think for a second that individual developers are ever going to stop being a key force in open source. Wayland itself is largely the brainchild of one man, anyway -- albeit one man in Red Hat's employ. What I do see is a difference between the kinds of projects that will be released by individuals and independent teams vs. those with corporate employ or sponsorship.

The former will focus on creating individual programs or libraries that have very specific applications -- a better text-editing component (say, Scintilla). They could also produce game-changing social-networking sites like Twitter, which might not be all that complex technically but which implement some new methodology for connecting people.

The latter, though, will be the ones creating the kind of larger, infrastructure-related work that requires the backing of a major outfit to get right. A project like Wayland may start small, but as it turns into something bigger and more potentially influential, it'll need that many more people and that much more coordination.

Again, I'm not saying one is better than the other -- just that the kind of project and the ultimate scope of its development may be better suited to having corporate backing as a way to make sure it's followed through all the way. A project like Wayland could grow into any number of things, not least of which being a total rewrite of the X stack (something which X.org has been doing for a while now.

I also haven't forgotten about the fact that this is all open source code. Anyone can, in theory, pick it up and run with it -- but there's a big difference between being able to do that and actually producing something that has lasting value. I don't think the power to do so will be confined to large companies, though -- but don't be shocked if we see most of such code coming from those places.

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