In corporate in-house software development it is common for requirements to be determined through a formal process resulting in the creation of a number of requirements documents. In open source software development, this often seems to be absent. Hence, my question is: how are requirements determined in open source software projects?
By "determining requirements" I simply mean "figuring out what features etc. should be developed as part of a specific software".
Best Answer
Open source projects sometimes have intense streams of user feedback, and sometimes corporations would simply pay to make certain features planned and implemented (by hiring their own developers or the original developers).
If your project has 100 users, you probably can develop whatever is most fun to code.
If your project has 100k users, most probably you already have a list of pain points most users want fixed in the next release, and a list of top N features that users request in your issue tracker and keep asking about on forums.
With this feedback, you can write requirement documents for your core team, create roadmaps to help independent contributors understand your vision, and hope that some of the 100k users will send in patches.