In this first section, we will focus on the production of free software from the perspective of its development or creation, i.e. without considering the possible business models that exploit it for profit.
Several subjects of this Master's degree, particularly those on software production, discuss the technological process characterising free software development at length.
Introduction to software development, Software engineering in free software environments and Advanced concepts of software development.
This technological process supplements the methodologies allowing us to formalise a viable cooperative project that will last over time. In this sense, the cooperation of the user community on the free software project is crucial for obtaining a critical mass of users to enable the project to be viable.
Consequently, many of these methodologies and actions are designed to offer support and guarantees to relations between the project and the user community. To understand the importance of this relationship, we can simply visit the resources offered by the more popular free software projects to the user community.
Popular projects
For example, OpenOffice.org (http://contributing.openoffice.org/) and Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org/contribute/).
To develop these concepts, over the next few sections we will describe three complementary points of view. First of all, we will consider some basic ideas on free software production. We will then briefly detail the main steps to take to implement a project based on free software. Lastly, we will detail the main aspects of free software project management.