Just finished reading Indie Fever, a research of Apple’s independent developer community:
‘Indie Fever’ is the first result of a multi-year human geography research program to investigate the social and economical world of so-called ‘Indie’ developers on the Macintosh platform. ‘Indie’ is the self-chosen nickname of software developers that serve worldwide markets from the Internet, hold their artistic values in high esteem and celebrate their ability to make high quality software as small companies.
It’s a social/economic research — a different read than your typical off-the-cuff blog post opining from personal anecdotes — so it does get dense at times, but overall an easy read even if you don’t connect with social studies. An interesting look into the interplay between the company that dictates the platform and the small vendors that make it useful for the rest of us.
I enjoyed reading it, there’s a lot to learn, even though I’m not an Apple developer, and no two vendor playgrounds are the same. I recommend it with one caveat: in some places it reads like Apple’s playground is the greener grass, if your benevolent dictator is Microsoft or Sun, you might want to quick-skip these parts.
Next on my to-read list: an exhaustive research of open source communities and the vendors that feed/starve them. Not that I know of such a research. Any good links to share?