InterNetNews server: inside an open-source project

What do you get when you give your source code away and encourage programmers around the world to make changes to it? Some Internet software development engineers believe you get a robust system with a large market share and development that is highly responsive to user needs. The team behind the InterNetNews Usenet server package is one such group of believers. INN provides programs to exchange Usenet messages with other servers and to deliver those messages to end users. The Internet Software Consortium oversees the INN and has been supporting its development under an open model. INN is a moderate-sized software project with more than 430 files containing nearly 150,000 lines in the uncompiled distribution. Programs are written mainly in C, Bourne shell, and Perl. The CVS revision control system manages all changes to files. The paper describes the logistics of InterNetNews.