The life of Open Source projects are not all fun and games. Often times, there is a feeling that you are loosing something when you finally have to let go. Still, these projects get to go out into the world and help others. Who could ask for anything more?

Leaders from three separate but related — and incredibly successful — free/open source projects agree: If you want the project to move to the next level, let go and let the community take over. We asked Larry Wall, creator of Perl; Brian Behlendorf, the Apache Project leader; and Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, for their thoughts on why this happens and how they and their projects have fared as a result.

All of these projects are tied in some way to the great enabler: the Internet. They share synergy with it. All have contributed to the growth of the Internet, and the Internet has provided the medium that has allowed them to thrive. If the Internet is one extended machine network, Perl is the baling wire that has held it together. The Apache Server has come out of nowhere to dominate the Internet statistically. And Linux is probably the best-loved kernel of all time, whose popularity continues to surge.

Larry Wall and Perl

What do you get when you cross sh with awk, sed, and C? That’s right, Perl, the Practical Extraction and Report Language. Larry Wall released version 1.0 of Perl in 1987. The rest is history. Perl went on to become the first of the three Ps represented by the third consonant and final character in the acronym LAMP. In short, it was a phenomenal success.

When I spoke to Larry on the phone about “letting go” of the project, he said in a very matter-of-fact way, “I had to. It got too big for one person.” He talked about the transition, which happened at about the same time as Perl 5. “The only alternative would be to keep Perl as a little text-processing engine, without any modules or anything like that.”

So what part does Larry play these days? He told me “Since we announced Perl 6, I specifically asked the community to help me redesign Perl. They turned around and said, ‘We still want you to be the language designer.’ So my part these days is architectural and linguistic.”

It’s clear that two things have happened: Larry has stepped back, but still plays a critical role. We’re not talking a palace revolution here, we’re talking about a role change in complete harmony with the community’s desires.