It’s funny how often terms like ‘open source’ and ‘crowdsourcing’ find their way into everyday discourse, where they are used casually to mean anything that involves lots of people. This diagram comes from a thoughtful post by Chris Grams. It begins:

It finally hit me the other day just why the open source way seems so much more elegantly designed (and less wasteful) to me than what I’ll call “the crowdsourcing way”.

1. Typical projects run the open source way have many contributors and many beneficiaries.

2. Typical projects run the crowdsourcing way have many contributors and few beneficiaries.

Worth reading in full. Thanks to Glyn Moody for spotting it.