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CoSource does this but doesn't have any means for the customer to check whether progress is being made (although they define a third party to judge when the project is completed). And this is where XP comes in: through UserStories, UnitTest s and ContinuousIntegration the customer can always check progress. Plus after each 2-4 week iteration they can terminate the project and only pay for the work done to that point.

XP would not be enforced, can't anyway, but the intention is to offer tools which allow the customer and developers to a) communicate and share ideas, b) allow the customer to see whether progress is being made and c) both sides to check the quality. Tools should not be forced upon projects, however, customers would have the right to define which tools should be used for a project (after all they sponsor the projects). However, to a certain extent, a project should be given time to find it's own tools of choice.

Benefits for customers:

1. Many potential customers can combine forces and allow a product to be dev

What the article does not point out is that SourceXchange has closed shop, and CoSource development is economically unsustainable. The problem in both cases is that people will not pay for open source development.

SourceXchange allowed programmers to negotiate the price of the software, with the result that no one was willing to meet these development costs. I am not aware of a single project that was sucessfully negotiated through SourceXchange.

CoSource is even worse, it allows people to request whatever projects for whatever amount of money they wish. The result is that most requests have zero dollars and zero cents committed. That's right, they expect someone to develop software for them without ever receiving a cent. Other projects have commitments of up to $300. There is no way you can develop a full-featured application for a total cost of $300.

Closed-source works because people are willing to fund closed-source shops with millions in investment cash. Until the same thing happens to open-source development, it will be playing catch-up to closed source applications.

A site with a similar idea is Cosource.com. The projects there tend to be a lot smaller in scope, but there are a lot more to choose from. Hopefully they won't end up in the same boat as SourceXChange.

BeOS R5 is one of the three operating systems I have installed on my machine, and that I use on a semi-regular basis (others are RH7, which I'm still trying to patch to some semblance of stability, and Windows 2000 Professional, which isn't great, but a hell of a lot better than any previous MS offering). I boot into Be whenever I need something quick. Just need to check my email, or want to read UF before I leave the house? BeOS. Nine second boot on this machine (500mHz P3, 640mB RAM, although it booted just as fast w/128mB), including a bunch of weird scripts I run at startup. OpenGL - the spinning teapot - isn't too great, this is true. However, Be has been working hard at getting a fully accelerated OpenGL library out the door, and benchmarks have proven that what's already been developed is quite speedy. I haven't been able to grab Gobe yet, but what I've seen looks pretty impressive.

My favorite feature is definitely the API. Yes, it might not beat NeXT, but it's probably the best C++ toolkit I've ever seen. No scary macros like MFC, weird Loop classes that you have to construct to run your events, no half-assed OOP like GTK+ or Qt (and I like them both too!). It's just beauteous, plain and simple. I can write an app in Be on a napkin in a restaurant because it's so easy.

I will be very sad to se Be go, if that happens. I'd even put up some money...anyone for Cosource?

For every small company that can't make money writing GPL software, there are 500 that can make money by using it. It saves a lot of money at my work that I can use perl for my scripting, apache for my webserver, and php for additional web stuff.

Perl is under the artistic license, lately dual licensed with the GPL. Apache is under an extended BSD license. PHP is under an extended BSD license. 0.5 out of 3 isn't so bad (though the available artistic licensing of perl makes the GPL fairly irrelevant.)

I can get these items at no cost and I don't have to worry about them ever disappearing off the face of the earth, while MS can do what they please. So tell me again how this benefits MS and how this is killing companies?

I'm going to take these in opposite orders:

How does the availability of free, copylefted software kill companies?

There are two sides to this, both of which are results of economic changes. The first is that some types of software becomes available at close to zero cost along with the benefit of the ability do easy codechanges, outcompeting higher priced proprietary software. This is good; the workforce and capital of the companies are redirected to other places where they can contribute more to society.

Then there is the second, dark side: Copylefted software block economic models which give groups of end-users choice and tweaking for their needs. In a proprietary environment, a development company can do changes to source code as an investment, based on how many more people they expect to be buying the software based on the changes they do. For a copylefted product, the changes needs to be paid for by the first comer(s).

This is easier to see in a scenario description. There are two cases here: Market dominated by proprietary or BSDLed software, and market dominated by GPLed software. BSDLed/proprietary are fairly equal for this scenario; either the company has the maintained codebase available for proprietary use because it is being maintained due to market income, or it has the codebase it can use available due to open source maintenance. (Codebases can also be available with royalties due to commercial licensing; this gives similar cases with more complications.)

Let's set the cost of developing the codebase in the first place at $500,000,-. Let's further say that a particular new feature has a value of $100 for 1000 users, and that the cost of developing the feature is $10,000,-.

In a proprietary or BSDLed environment, this means that the company can develop the feature and sell it for anywhere below $100,000,-, while still both giving value to each customer. $90,000,- is available as cost/benefit difference, and up to this amount can be taken out as profit by the comapny while still adding value to society. This is enough available profit that it is reasonable to take the intial risk. Thus, the customers get their feature and the company get profit and everybody is better off (likely also the open source codebase, due to the distiction between strategic and tactical changes[1].)

Now for the GPLed case. There isn't a codebase available for the company to do properiary changes to, ao it has to develop that before going on to the profit side. Whoops, there was a $500,000,- cut of their $90,000,- potential profit - that's a $410,000,- loss. No way they are going to give those users the feature.

Well, what about the users themselves? Can't they just pay for the change to be incorporated into the GPLed codebase?

For each individual user, this is a loss. Paying directly to have the feature incorporated is a 100x cost increase compared to the benefit gotten back - not interesting.

Paying as a group is theoretically possible, but fraught with problems[2]. First, you need to get hold of the people in the group and get them to agree about what they need, and agree to pay for something they haven't seen, and which they will get no matter if *they as single entities* pay or not. Second, the cost of development will likely be higher. The developer in the proprietary example gets his profit from a fairly large benefit margin and can thus absorb risk directly; when working on the open source codebase, the risk adjusted cost of development will be higher, perhaps $15,000,-. Add $5,000,- in solicitation costs, and you're up to $20,000,- - still a lot less than the benefit marigin, but it needs a lot of contributors to get going.

[1] Development projects will usually include both strategic changes (those changes done to get revenue from customers by sales) and tactial changes (changes done to support the strategic changes, but without direct value in and of themselves.) Giving tactical changes back to the open source project one is branched off makes commercial sense; it decreases merge costs when updating from the free codebase, and increase employee happiness.

[2] Yes, I know about the Free Software Bazar, (no offers since august; no offers claimed since september 1999), SourceXchange (does not do pooling; seems to work for company-sponsored offers) and CoSource (does pooling; has transcated a total of $17252 since august 1999, with $9678 going to a single project. This is about two months of paid developer time at consultancy rates, total.)

How does this benefit MS?

MS has a number of codebases they are effectively guaranteed revenue from. Their market share is larger than the competitors in most areas. They've already sunk the development costs incurred so far. With GPLed software driving prices for alternatives towards zero, it gets harder for proprietary competitors to make a profit, and MS can stand the price war WRT development quite a bit longer than them (due to having a large number of copies to spread the development costs on.)

This is likely to effectively squeeze competitors out of the market, until you get to a point where you're only left with two forces: Open Source alternatives and MS. If the Open Source alternative is GPLed, MS can raise the prise almost as far as they want for those that don't get the features they need from the Open Source codebase - creating a new proprietary competitor will be too expensive.

I'm not certain this is going to happen, but the possibility is distinctly there.

Eivind (in most cases in favour of the BSD license, if that wasn't clear ;)

• cosource
• source exchange
• the free software bazaar

theres a few more that I can't think of.

Plus, if you want more ideas, I bet I can think of one every 15 minutes for an entire night. I'll meet you at the local watering hole. You buy.

Click here for $50!

Cosource.com is a web service of VistaSource

Anyone know the impact?

http://www.rocketaware.com/ has over 30,000 links to
source, libraries, functions, applications, and documentation.

This would be a good project to put up on cosource.com.

www.sourcexchange.com
www.cosource.com
The Free Software Bazaar

Let me know if you see any more. This could soon be my only source of income.

For those who want a tool enough to pay something for it, there are a couple of sites where you can propose a project and make an offer for it: Cosource.com and The Free Software Bazaar.

------

http://www.cosource.com/cgi-bi n/cos.pl/wish/info/337

[Disclaimer: I work for Cosource.]

No one [...] will enter a field where the prospects of earning a decent living are substantially lower than in other fields.

Being able to earn a living is not necessarily dependent upon the ability to own IP. At the risk of repeating what others have said over and over, it's all about services. Look at sourceXchange, CoSource, and the other similar sites popping up these days. They work precisely because the value is in the ability to code, not the the produced software. Besides, most people who produce IP never see big returns from their work anyway. They exchange their IP production services for a steady paycheck.

The basic point behind all of this is that the value of the IP being copied outweighs the cost of copying it. That balance is only going to tip further as bandwidth increases and storage gets cheaper. Interests that make money selling IP will continue to put in technical countermeasures and legal deterrents, but they're fighting a losing battle. In an economic sense, information really does want to be free.

Then, secretaries won't mind using it, bosses won't mind buying it, tech people won't get frustrated with the document format.

Check out the following request for a Visual DocBook/XML Editor on CoSource and lend your support.

Currently Arbortext Adept, SoftQuad XMetal and Adobe FrameMaker cost way more than MS Word does, so there's no incentive for frugal business managers to purchase them. An inexpensive, easy to use visual editor might be able to tip the balance and encourage people to produce documents in non-proprietary formats.

Without copyright, everybody is selling my binary-only modifications. Ok, what's my incentive to make better software?

People have, and always will, write programs (and songs, and stories, and poems) without getting paid to do so.

New-school: in addition to the above, you could be hired to write an open-source application, or you could write a custom job on contract. See CoSource or SourceExchange for two models of how you can get paid to write free software.

Many large and interesting software projects being written today could be open sourced without much economic impact, because they're custom-made. For example, my current contract is hacking for TRW on EDOS, a NASA project. Giving NASA the source wouldn't really make a difference, since they're expected to be the only user. (Heck, they might be getting it now - I'm just the hired help, I don't know the details.)

There are also secondary ways to make a buck. You can sell support, manuals, and the like; and I think that in the future we'll actually see mechandizing and endorsements start to play a role. Hell, if Microsoft can sell a "Windows 95" blend of coffee (I'm not making this up), why not "Jolt: Official Cola of Red Hat Linux"?

Bringing the issue back to music -- suppose I write a great song, Warner Brothers tapes it and has their flavor-of-the-month artist record her own version. I stayed up late many nights working on that song, but WB can afford to package it and make more money when their artist tours. They get income from concerts, t-shirts, and nicely-packaged CDs. I get ZERO.

Which is why I've been saying that while making and giving away copies should be unrestricted, selling copies or other profit-making off a work might require that a royalty be paid to the author. I think that song performance royalties are a good model to start from - I can perform any song anywhere (as if anyone could stop me), but if I'm getting paid I (really the venue owner, usually) owe the artist a cut via BMI or ASCAP.

But strictly, that's not a copyright issue, since anyone would still have the right to make copies of the work. We're talking about something new, a "salesright" if you will, which is more practical and more ethically palatable.

CoSource and sourceXchange have been mildy successful in promoting a sort of auction style commercial OSS development model. Ultimately, what kind of success do you think these sites will have. What changes do they need to make to become the next Ebay? Can you give an example of one more type of business model in which a web community will work together in the spirit of the open source movement?

You'd think it'd never happened before!

--

OTOH, from the very limited amount of attention I've given it, it doesn't seem like that many people are getting paid -- there are a lot of semi-cool-sounding projects with $10 committed to them, and a lot of projects that have stagnated once half the amount needed was raised. If this impression is accurate, then it's a terrible shame.

There are a lot of things that people are doing to make open-source systems simpler and more powerful. Go to a site like sourcexchange or cosource that lists things that people would like to have done, find (or add) something that you would *love* to see done, and sign up as a sponsor.

Tell the CPA's to go to www.cosource.com. Make a request, and they can state how much they would like to get paid to write the package. Work can start after enough people have pledged money towards the project.

Try looking at CoSource. I've been able to develop GPLed code and be paid for it
(well, actually I think the check is still in the post, as I haven't got it yet, but I digress).
There's quite a bit of cash floating about and CoSource has a few ideas on how to
make cash from software you are already developing, so I'd urge you to take a look.

Another avenue is sourceXchange, who cater for the corporate taste; but you
will have to convince a reasonably sized company to sponsor you.

Savant

This is exactly the problem we are trying to solve with Cosource.com. That is, how can you make a living writing free software?

As we know, in traditional licensed software, you sink a large speculative R&D effort, protect the result with copyright (or patent) and then hope to recoup that investment (and turn a profit) by selling licenses of the software over time for some price. People who don't pay can't legally use the software.

For software that satisfies the Open Source definition, copies are required to be free. So how can a developer ever hope to recoup the large sunk R&D expense?

An answer is to gather together AHEAD OF TIME a group of motivated buyers (for whom the software solves an important problem) who commit to pay for a particular software application/feature/bugfix if someone succeeds in developing it. Upon completion, it can be released as open source and freely copied. The buyers must be types who don't worry about free riders -- their only concern must be that they want this software to exist to solve some problem/need they have.

There needs to be a service to provide a legal framework to take these commitments, manage sucess/failure of the developer's effort, and then collect payments from the multiple buyers and pay the developer. It's a "market maker" role for open source software needs.

That's what Cosource.com does. Check it out!

Bernie Thompson
Founder, Cosource.com

This is exactly the problem we are trying to solve with Cosource.com. That is, how can you make a living writing free software?

As we know, in traditional licensed software, you sink a large speculative R&D effort, protect the result with copyright (or patent) and then hope to recoup that investment (and turn a profit) by selling licenses of the software over time for some price. People who don't pay can't legally use the software.

For software that satisfies the Open Source definition, copies are required to be free. So how can a developer ever hope to recoup the large sunk R&D expense?

An answer is to gather together AHEAD OF TIME a group of motivated buyers (for whom the software solves an important problem) who commit to pay for a particular software application/feature/bugfix if someone succeeds in developing it. Upon completion, it can be released as open source and freely copied. The buyers must be types who don't worry about free riders -- their only concern must be that they want this software to exist to solve some problem/need they have.

There needs to be a service to provide a legal framework to take these commitments, manage sucess/failure of the developer's effort, and then collect payments from the multiple buyers and pay the developer. It's a "market maker" role for open source software needs.

That's what Cosource.com does. Check it out!

Bernie Thompson
Founder, Cosource.com

That's why I went straight to places such as cosource , and source exchange which seemed to employ the idea of Bazaar as mentioned in ESR's papers. However, the lack of interest turned me down a bit. I found some projects that I could do, but the payback seemed so unpromising contrasted to the amount of work awaiting that I had to hesitate.

Is the Bazaar really working only for the most famous, like Miguel de Icaza [who came up as the lead coder of the better Windows look-alike, no flames :), ah and a half-functional spreadsheet app ;) ], or ESR because he thought open source was a jolly good idea, and as the maintainer of slightly arrogant "Jargon File"? Just being skeptical here.

It might just be that it's not OSS and Bazaar which ESR takes it to be, but rather voluntarily and charity work for the benefit of all as RMS puts it. Then, we wouldn't be hoping for wealth or fame some developers and some advocates did get. We would simply not be asking for it.

Of course, let's be skeptical about this, too. I'm personally unaware of anyone who would like to write an OS as an Anonymous Coward. That's where being impersonal starts to break. People deserve some sort of credit for what they've done.

To sum up, there's a sort of uncertainty about the success of true "Bazaar" like communitys. We're going to have to see if "sponsors" and "developers" are really going to be matched. If it turns out to be like that, I'm going to be among the happy ones. However, the "free software" approach may be more realistic, and asking for companies and people to join the cause of "free software" may be the right way to earn from software as we like it.

Forget the money; Cosource is a good place to share ideas. I wanted my voice modem to answer my phone, take a voice message, and email it to me at over my DSL line. Cosource gave me a forum to share the idea, and lo and behold, it eventually reached a programmer who both likes it and is willing to do the work. The program is now being written under the GPL for linux. This is great! (Also, I wouldn't have known where to best share such an idea before Cosource. It way beats asking your officemates.)

In fact defending everyone's freedom BUT the freedom of developers to charge for the work they have undertaken,

www.cosource.com

For instance, you say, "Gee, I'd really like a GPL'd foobar client with a built-in spam filter." You put up an RFP, I see it and say, "I'll write one when there's a commitment of $1000". You guarantee $200. Your competitor sees the RFP, thinks, "Hey, I could use a foobar client like that!" and puts up $150. Someone else pledges $20, and so on until there's a total commitment of $1000. Then I write the program, it goes through the approval mechanism, everybody pays up their pledges, I get paid, the code gets released, and everyone's happy.

There are other projects where it's difficult for your competition to benefit, at least immeditately, from the new code. If I do an open source port of something to the AIX architecture for IBM, Sun won't benefit.

OSS relies on people's good nature to get software written.

In fact there are at least two websites set up to match developers with people who will pay them to write OSS - CoSource and SourceXchange.

I normally would agree with you on doing somebody else's work for cheap, but considering Mozilla is looking like our only shot at a !(Microsoft) web browser version 5+ I'm willing to do something like that just for the t-shirt. Worst case, I improve my understanding of patterns and improve a product that I can use directly. Best case, I win a book that I can loan out instead of MY copy. I mean, UML and Patterns books are worse that ACDC and Black Sabbath albums, they never come back.

Here's an example of your programming contest idea. Sounds like it was alot of fun. Anyway the alternative would be to post a request and proposal on co-source to do the work and see what kind of cash you could raise.

1. Command shell that doesn't involve a lot of learning. "move" should be the command to move a file, "copy" should be the command to copy a file, "delete" and "remove" should remove a file. Joe Blow doesn't care that when all we had was 6 letter commands, using "rm" for delete a good idea. We don't have those limits any more, we shouldn't be limited by them. (My suggestion is to call this DOS, for Dumb Old Shell, and make it work much like the MS-DOS command line.)

Alias commands could handle this fairly well
.aliases contents
--------------------
alias remove='rm'
alias move='mv'
alias copy='cp'
alias delete='rm'

I don't think it's the limitations of the OS that restrict us to two or three letter commands. I think it's just faster to type 'rm' rather than 'remove'.

2. Plug and Play Everywhere! Joe Blow does not want to mount and unmount CDs himself, nor does he want to figure out the IRQ, base I/O address, etc. for his hardware. So make sure that Joe Blow doesn't have to deal with those things.

Supermount is the best solution I've seen to this problem. It allows you to dynamically mount removable media (this should be very nice). A bounty has been accepted to port it to the 2.2x series of kernels at cosource.

As to IRQ and other conflicts, the best solution to this I've heard is chucking ISA out the window. Everything becomes so much easier when you use PCI.

3. A good GUI/WM combination that comes default with all Linux distros. Joe Blow does not like command line interfaces and will avoid them wherever possible. So give him a GUI he can use easily and not be (too) confused by.

KDE isn't too bad, even my wife can use it. And she is a complete luddite. As to standardizing on one... I'm not too keen on the idea, but I would like it if the gnome/kde/whatever played nicer together.

4. Official suppourt from hardware vendors. If Joe Blow can't buy a new peice of hardware, plug it in, turn it on, install some drivers, and start
using it; Joe Blow doesn't want it.

Soon grasshopper, soon this too shall come to pass. All my HW is supported (though my v770 stills trashes X at random (sigh)), it's a lot better than it uses to be in the 1.0 kernel days. Ugghh, I don't even want to talk about installing slackware from 3.5 disks (out of 40 disks, 1 or 2 was always bad).

I think there is a grand opportunity for anyone who would like to start such a site (or give me 2 mil. to do it :-),

It was, indeed, a well considered essay. However, I'm forced to disagree on a number of points.

Why assume greed?
Money hasn't been the motivator so far; why assume that once someone's thrown some cash into a bucket that this event is going to transform the community? It seems more likely that teams of college kids will band together to make enough money for a party/trip/whatever, or that LUG programming SIGs will look to this as a way to earn funding for the group. Some programmers may have a go at making this pay the bills; perhaps it will work. I don't think we're all going to drop what we're doing and become bounty coders.

What about peer review?
Both sourceXchange and CoSource have made peer review an integral part of the process -- and a bar that must be cleared before getting paid. I don't think that it would make good business sense for them to lower that bar any further than the project sponsor(s) want it to be set.

Inspired Annoyance
If people were already getting interested, there'd be no need for a bounty; in effect, these companies are saying, "We'll pay more if someone can do something which would benefit us in a timeframe we can accept." This doesn't mean that spare-time hackers like myself will flock to it because it's a paid project -- you might well find that the money convinces someone who was already a bit interested in the project's aims to rearrange their priorities in order to get paid to scratch their itch.

It's Still Open Source!
My final, and strongest, point: no matter what, the end result is open source. If you think the code's sloppy, pitch in and fix it; if there's not enough art in the crafted code, show them what Michaelangelo could have done with a keyboard. You've got the choice...and in the meantime, we've got the code.

I'd probably ramble more, but I've got to go to work. You get the idea.

--j

I'm not sure how sourceXchange is handling this --probably selected by the developer as a part of their RFP.

With Cosource.com, the developer places a bid to win the project. That bid includes their price, their schedule, their peer reviewer, and their license.

Project sponsors get to look at and accept/reject each bid. The first bid to gather enough sponsors to pay the price is assigned the project.

The license is not a text field.. it is a menu of radio buttons of standards licenses like GPL, MPL, etc. with links for everyone to go read the full license text on the home site.

I'd love to heard any comments you have on the way we're doing this. We expect that it'll take a good bit of fine-tuning to get this right so we're balancing the needs of sponsors, developers, and the Open Source community at large.

Bernie Thompson
Cosource.com

Hi Ed,

Obviously we haven't made this clear enough (our upcoming FAQ will speak to more cases) -- Cosource.com is designed to do just what you're asking for: Either an initial sponsor or a developer posts a project, and we start gathering sponsors for that project.

We handle the developer-initiated case, and we certainly handle the multiple sponsors -- that's our primary focus! This logic for the site is implemented in Perl (mySQL database).

Join our beta program and check it out...

Cheers,
Bernie Thompson
Cosource.com

This is always going to be a significant problem. Not just for specific projects, but for things like documention and quality control / testing. People may want to code it, but do they want to take the extra steps to make it maintainable?

Sadly, those steps are rarely taken in commerical, proprietary code...

Cosource mentions docmentation as one of its potential type of projects. I don't see why testing, code reviews, et cetera can't be contracted out just like development.