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Asynchrony: Paid Open Source Hacking?
Blackheart2 writes "Asynchrony
(one of /.'s sponsors) is a site which, like SourceForge, is hosting open source projects, but with a difference: team members hold shares in their projects according to the amount of effort they contribute, and 'whenever there is profit to be made, instead of taking the work done by members of the open source development team and starting a separate profitable company, Asynchrony is able to distribute some percentage of product revenues to the people who made the product possible, using the share ownership information.' See their Open Source White Paper for details, especially the end. " I'm really skeptical that something like this would work, but hell, it would be cool to get a few bucks when you send a diff off to a -dev mailing list ;) But its good food for thought.
Team review, like in real life. Say ten people have been working at some kind of project, probably not having started at the same time. After six or twelve months of contributions just ask the others what their opinion is and valuable contributions were made give them all the same.
It does not make much sense to search for a precise metrics as ten lines of code could be more important than 10.000. As a software developer, and this time I feel free to say a damned good one, I can say it is always we and our project. After all it is always us going for some beers as soon as something is out of the door again %*)
I figure, it might be a good way to motivate myself to keep in practice with some skills I don't use very often.
When I'm coding for myself, I tend to gravitate to a small number of tools I really like, and tend to not use other tools that I know.
As an example, last year I was using SmallTalk all the time, as I was involved in projects that used it. I haven't touched it since.
(Java, c++, and rxml/pike are what I've used the most recently.)
I intend to list myself in their database under skills I have experience in, but need motivation to keep in practice with.
If I get picked, I'll be forced to stay in practice!
If VA, RH, Caldera and the rest disappear tomorrow, Linux won't stop existing. I happen to belong to the school of thought that more companies who pay to have people code full time, the better.
That said, I don't like the Asynchrony approach to this, but I welcome thier trying out a newish approach.
Chris DiBona
VA Linux Systems
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Grant Chair, Linux Int.
Pres, SVLUG
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
...someday.
Somebody will get it right. I don't know if it will be Cosource, SourceForge, Asynchro-whatever or some other worthy project.
The tough part is, of course, setting the share value. But I suspect that's not as hard as you might expect. Some kind of reverse auction set-up might do the trick. And even a kind of arbitrary project-manager-god would result in better code than counting bytes or lines of code.
Ultimately, there are two political hurdles which may prove the real stumbling block: history and open-source leadership.
History will work against it because the whole thing works much like a multi-level marketing scheme. While not all of these things are crooked, crooks like 'em well enough to leave a bad taste in many mouths. And most Ponzi schemes and chain letters use some similar methodologies.
And you can expect most of the leadership of the open-source movement to oppose this. I'm not sure exactly why, but they seem to have a kind of knee-jerk reaction about this kind of thing. I once proposed something vaguely like this ("vague" both in the sense that it wasn't exactly the same and in the sense that I had not really thought it through and was not proposing anything this concrete) to Eric Raymond. He didn't even let me finish my sentence before he said something like, "I think I know where you're going, and I don't like it...."
He had some of the same practical objections which have been discussed in this discussion, but I got the impression he had a more visceral reaction against it which he didn't really put into words.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
OK, so you've lost some money. We're all heart broken for you. Now SHUT UP and go piss in some other pool. You've been saying the same stupid shit over and over (and over and over) for long enough.
"Open Source" and linux have been around longer than VA, RedHat, et al. Maybe there's money to be made here, maybe not; those companies and many others are in the process of finding out. Personally I have some doubts but I'm willing to give them some time before i declare that their business model has failed.
If no company ever makes money from free software, that will not affect the quality of the software, which is why I use it in the first place. People will keep developing fun stuff and releasing it money or no; they have up to now.
VA Linux != "open source", or even slashdot.
Cosource.com has tried linking buyers and programmers. It's an excellent idea, but from what I've seen of the completed projects, the prices paid really don't even come close to the hours that it would take an average programmer to do the job. It doesn't compare to my day job. I think open source programming is a viable business model, but I don't think we're quite at the point where we can implement it as a big open market on a website.
First it needs more recognition from big corporations that realize they can actually get their products for cheaper if they allow open source components to be used by then releasing it as open source again.
A million dollar software project can be broken into a series of different projects, each just large enough that it can be spec'd out with a reasonable set of milestones (almost always less than 15-20). Software development schedules always change based on inherent risk, so you probably shouldn't spec out a 500 milestone project. And the Sponsor always has to be someone who can check the Developer's work - so this isn't exactly "put $15K in, get good solid code out overnight" kind of thing.
I would think that if you were the project manager for a 15 person software development project, you could probably parallelize 10-15 sub-projects in sourceXchange (or less if you have multiple developers per project), all working on different things. Of course it's not always nice and parallelizable, sometimes there's only work for a few at a time - but the beauty of this model is that you don't have to pay for 15 full time developers during those periods.
There's another thing a developer can do - be a Sponsor on a project where the person actually paying is upstream, and only knows their need, not how to define a solution. In other words, let's say you (average Slashdot reader) know of someone who has a need for some sort of development (say a Linux driver for the CCD camera in the Sony Vaio Picturebook) and is willing to pay to have it developed, yet doesn't know enough about Linux kernel internals to write a spec or approve milestones. You would do it, if fact you know how you'd do it, but you don't have nearly enough time. This model lets you be the "sponsor", acting as a subcontractor to this other someone who needs the driver written, who specifies (generally) what to build and how, and then outsources that actual development through sourceXchange, passing along the cost (plus an amount for your own time and effort) to the original customer.
There's lots of flexibility in the system.
Thanks.
Brian
More that that - it is probably the thing that'll make or break the idea. Being fair and being seen to be fair is absolutely crucial - once a little acorn of mistrust is placed then the potential for acrimony is astonishing. Particularly so in the rather heated environment of open source: even without money there has been plenty of ego clashes. With recent IPOs things have become even more stressed. Now here is a new method of spreading bad feeling.
Because of the impossibility of deciding a system that everyone will agree is fair (open source can't even agree on the name for Linux, or is that GNU/Linux) then I think that this will cause more problems in the long run for the open source movement than it will solve. I'd be surprised if, within a few years of this taking off, someone isn't sueing someone else.
Don't take this a critisism of the open source movement or the people involved - this is just an observation of how any people tend to interact when money and/or fame is involved.
As for the moderator who moded down the first post - I assume that it was a reflex action of first is bad: you should post to this story and remove your moderation because "offtopic" is completely unjustified and you will get such a beating in the metamoderation that it will make grown men flinch.
If the Open Source Community is relying on people's good feeling and giving back, they're screwed. I'm sorry, but there are a lot of people who don't give a crap and will screw you to the wall, GPL or no GPL.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
This is always been my fundamental question about open source. I guess I just don't GET IT. I've read all the stuff, but I don't see what the $ advantage would be to me open sourcing a program I wrote.
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DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Dunno about "wisdom", but there is some humor in the use of this misquotation of a Biblical verse to justify a position not supported at all by the verse itself:
(Emphasis added.)
After all, doesn't it seem unlikely that any credible "wisdom" would claim as the root of all evil something that was invented only a few thousand years ago? But the love of what it represents...well....
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
Managing a software project can be a very time consuming position. If the project is large enough, one could spend hours and hours just hooking people up, analyzing designs, determining what features get in, prioritizing bugs, etc. All these things are crucial to a successful software project, but they don't produce anything concrete. How is the amount of effort these people put into a project going to be measured?
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47% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
I really like Source Exchange, but I bet the first time I post a major product that would require massive number of developers say oh.. 15 Full Time developers It would be a horrible thing to manage. Just my opinon but if im paying for something maybe call it a million dollar year long project.. Do you guys really think something like Source Exchange has that much talent reading it and or the people who read that are going to oraganize themselves effeciently? No.. then you cany play in big business.. Thanks have a nice day back to corporate america....
JA
Click here to read about the tragedy of the commons
someone gets screwed, we all do.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
No, but if I write a piece of software I may release it under the GPL *AND* also sell the code under a commercial liscence.
Why? Because the GPL is a liscense. It is what gives the right to use and modify to those who do not hold the copyright. If I have written the code I own the copyright and hence am not bound by any provision in the GPL (other then the fact I cannot go after legitimate users for copyright infringement). Therefore I am fully within my rights to sell this code seperately.
However if I am a third party company (i.e. one who obtained the code through a GPL'ed source) I have no rights to the code other than what the GPL gives me. As such this third party company cannot resell the code as the original poster claimed.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
You'd think it'd never happened before!
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
I'm not trying to troll -- I really want to know where they expect to get money? If it's investors, how do they expect to make money for the investors?
--
I'll bite on this troll:
;-)
I find it highly unlikely that Sun will be out of business in a year. The reason is that Sun still exists primarily to sell hardware, as much as they would like you to believe otherwise.
Linux however, may just end up killing Solaris off, especially Solaris for x86. Sun's failure to release a beta of StarOffice 5.2 for Solaris/x86 may in fact indicate that they are already getting ready to EOL it.
It's a lot less likely that Solaris for SPARC will disappear, since you get it with every Sun box you buy. Also, Solaris is optimized for huge systems, something Linux has not yet proven itself in AFAIK (please correct me if I'm wrong -- but make sure you have a nice valid link!)
Anyway, I find it more likely that SGI or IBM will kill Sun off then Linux will.
I wouldn't bet on Microsoft going anywhere either. Unless the regular folks can be convinced in one year's time that nothing Microsoft makes is worth buying, Microsoft will still have a dependable stream of revenue in things like Windows Consumer, Office, and the Age of Empires series
Even if that does happen, Microsoft _will_ do what it takes to survive.
Unless you count a breakup as "going out of business"... Even then, it's not likely the breakup will be completed within a year either.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
The first two lines of the white paper have the phrase 'paradigm shift' and the word 'digerati'. If we were playing buzzword bingo, the first paragraph would end the game.
I havn't seen this much I'm-trying-to-be-hip-everyone-look-at-me since Wired was launched.
Maybe there are honest-to-goodness people inside those Armanis, but I think they need to spend a few weeks reading -dev lists themselves before anything else. Developers, especially Open Source developers, tend to be a pragmatic lot. While 'paradigm shifts' may be arousing for the marketing deparment and Ted in Sales, I don't think they'll have the intended response with the Open Source community.
I read through their membership agreement yesterday when the add came up on me for the first time. You sign on and agree to an NDA, and the "worth" of jobs are assigned by the people in charge of specific programs. so I think that that should reasonable cap the fairness issue. But it isn't really open source -- you are working on software for a company to sell. It has an interesting idea -- lets higher 1000's of programmers and give them a piece of code to write and integrate, and if we can sell the thing afterwords, then we will trickle the shares down. They are hoping to capitalise on our community. The flip is that it creates a whole new development model that may give rise to a cyberpunkish environment where programmers are freelancers that take little pieces of projects. Will they survive? Interesting to see. I considered signing on, but I think hoping and praying for a project to sell and putting lots of time into it like that just isn't for me. If I am going to put my free time into a project, I am going to make sure it's something I like to do, not slaving for a corparation for no money unless the product sells, that's just backwards to me.
More Caffeine. NOW
Now, by "commercial", do you mean proprietary or for any "commercial" purpose?
i.e., in your licensing scheme, is a special dispensation purchased by those who want to include it in proprietary software? (Like the way Troll Tech's QPL works)
Or, do you mean for all "commercial" purposes, such as reselling, or packaging and selling your own distributions? (In which case, I'd be extremely reluctant to call that licensing scheme "open source".)
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
But how do they keep things fair? by # of submissions? or by content? no 1st
"I do not go believe comes out therefrom that I will concentrate on always more special zones."
--Linus To
It's hard to swallow the idea in the opening comment that Slashdoot was a high hoop for Asynchrony. The tone of the letter is advertising AND THERE IS EVEN USE OF CAPS. And the token "we love open source" sounded... token.
As I said it must be difficult to juggle the personal tone and represent the company as well. Maybe some training would be helpful.
This is an especially thorny issue in programs requiring external (non-CS knowledge). Take an encryption utility. Maybe it contains 50,000 lines of UI code and 200 lines actually doing cryptographic work. Yet those 200 lines....which may be very dense and difficult for those who are uninitiated to code...constitute the core of the program.
In addition what additional compensation do managers recieve i.e. people like Linus or Miguel or so forth who may do far more work directing others then in the code they contribute themselves.
Team review seems like an exceptionally bad idea on a large project. What if I wrote the driver for a certain type of disk drive? Most people in working on the kernel may not even remember what I did not to mention have any idea how difficult it was.
Besides should we compensate those who write more often used code? If my driver is for a disk drive only I and three others use should I be as compensated as the man who wrote the seagate driver?
All in all it seems like the prospect of money may ruin the development of many projects. Some developers may work to keep others out because they will dilute their potential profits...or write bloated windows type code to increase their profits. It seems this kind of rivalry might tear the development team apart
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Even after reading the buzzword-laden write up for this, its still not abundantly clear how they can insure that individual coders will get a significantly large enough slice of the pie to warrant them even embarking on the task in the first place.
As a coder or project manager, you're probably just as well off securing hosting space on a third-party server with no vested interest in what you're developing.
Besides, this sort of ant-farm implementation seems a little flawed straight out of the gate -- By sheer math, the larger the project, the more people you've got contributing to work, and the smaller the divisions of profit become. The process becomes entirely self-defeating as the size of a project increases. Lay ontop of that the inherent risk of developing openly, and the odds are already stacked even more heavilly against you. No thanks, i'll pass.
Popeyeronic adj. [pop-AYE-rah-nik] -- The tendency of small Linux companies to become destructive and threatening once they get their hands on the green stuff. See: Andover.net, VA Linux Systems, Red Hat.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Bowie J. Poag
Sorry, that would not be an Open Source license. The point of having software be Open Source is that it provides all the necessary components to being able to outlive its original authors. Such a license would prevent that.
Brian
Having to choose from a set of tasks (or make everyone agree that a task is needed) seems like an uncommon way of doing Open Source development. Usually, there is one (or maybe two) main contributers who write the bulk of the first part of the project, with several other contributers that feel that they need modifications for their own personal needs. Usually, the team does not have a set list of tasks that developers choose from, or organize beforehand.
Well, this may be different depending on the particular project, but it seems to me that this might suffer from several problems:
1) Feature bloat. With more features to add to a project, each developer has the oppertunity to increase their share in the project. Developers might create work for themselves.
2) Infighting. Who ends up being the overall judge of this? What happens if two developers want to do the same task?
I can see this causing a project to quickly break down.
This sounds like a good idea on paper, but in practice, wouldn't it be difficult to quantify the value of an individual's contribution to a project?
You could always try to use a simplistic yardstick such as lines of code written. But even ignoring the difficulty in keeping track of that in a large shared project, can (and should) we honestly value code by its mere size? I think not -- in fact, often, quite the opposite would make more sense.
Reminds me of an old story about the development of OS/2. The IBM programmers were evaluated by their superiors according to the number of lines of code they wrote in a day. When the code began to be passed back and forth between IBM and Microsoft, the IBM people began to get very upset, because the Microsoft coders were actually reducing the lines of code in the source! Negative productivity! Auuuughhh!
begin 644
-ryan
-ryan
"Any way you look at it, all the information that a person accumulates in a lifetime is just a drop in the bucket."
How many times have I seen "Open Source" bandied about by know-nothing corporations as a quick and easy way of lining their pockets?
How many times have I seen an "Open Source" company take a nose dive after money became an issue?
How many times have I seen self-serving crap on Slashdot? Are we going to devote special articles to all the advertisers now? Somebody get the gun: Madison Avenue is here, big time. (Despite previously complaining about DoubleClick, Andover.net continues to use them. Explain the ethics of that situation)
I find it hard to believe that most Free Software Projects are founded with the intent of earning money; certainly one of the earliest, the GNU Project, wasn't created to make RMS rich. Sure, maybe some famous developers make some big bucks, but that's mostly because they manage to finangle their way into the companies that are already exploiting the programmer's labor. Most projects remain a labor of love: worked on not for money, but for the prospect of having a complete program, which both the creator and others can use.
This is where the commercial aspect breaks down: the capitalistic reward system is inherently based on the (obviously flawed) notion that all workers expect to be compensated in capital for their work. Asynchrony, no doubt filled to the brim with B-School grads, can concieve of no other system. Obviously, they think, these people work with money as their target.
As undoubtedly most people here are aware, this is far from the truth. While money is nice and useful, it is not the end-all reward. Hacking Free Software is not about money. It is about community, helpfullness, and other aims which are contrary to the capitalist system (despite what the heavily indoctrinated will tell you; any Ayn Rand book will make this clear).
In conclusion, the attempts of this "company" to turn the Free Software Commnunity into greedy, squabling, unethical money-grubbers is neither needed nor wanted. There is much wisdom in the saying that "Money is the root of all evil": it is easier to inspire jealousy, perhaps the must destructive instinct, with money than any other reward which hacking might bring. Money brings coporations, corporations bring legions of bean counters focused on the bottom line, ethics and community be damned.
It's enough of a problem already, more fuel on the fire isn't needed.
You're assuming that the stock exchange valuations are valid.
You must keep in mind that the system of publicly held corporations is not a free market. People own a company, and share in the profit, WITHOUT being liable for its actions, and its debts.
Combine that with laws basically forcing companies to focus on the short term profit (and worse, just focusing on the share price), and you get a fatally skewed model.
If you're judging open source business models based on Wall Street, you'll not get very far by me.
I'm the Chief Technology Officer at Asynchrony, and I wanted to briefly respond to a few of the comments that have been made so far.
We are a software project repository, both for proprietary and open source products. Our idea is that people who create products together over the Internet, (whether they are open source applications, proprietary software programs, or technical manuals) can be compensated fairly for those products and be supported by a marketing department and brand-name that they would not otherwise be able to obtain working on their own.
We don't compensate by lines of code. Our method is this: for each task that is accomplished on the project, "shares" are received. Each "share" represents some percentage of the project. When the project is complete and the resulting product is sold, up to 90% of the net sales of the product is returned to the project team, and that amount is divided based upon the way the shares were allocated during the project. If you received 20% of the shares, you get 20% of the team's portion of the money.
Also, we are not just a bunch of kids. We are a company serious about making money for our members and ourselves. We don't have a big software or hardware company backing us up, which means we have no loyalties except to our members. However, we do have investors who believe in the idea and what it could possibly accomplish. We're also a bunch of geeks at heart, and my chief system engineer (Slashdot name: mercybeat - he's responsible for making me a Slashdot addict) and I are totally pumped about quitting our old corporate jobs and starting an Internet company for developers.
Finally, we think open source can make money. If the core members of an open source project are working on our site, then that essentially makes us the logical place to go to get the latest versions and the best possible support (who better to support an application than the team that created it?). It puts a corporate face and a voice on the phone to large companies who are afraid of the "out of nowhere" aspect of open source, and we think that gives us a competitive advantage over another company who might "steal" the software. Our purpose for hosting open source is not to make money. However, as the white paper points out, the important thing is that IF THERE IS MONEY TO BE MADE, IT WILL BE RETURNED TO THE PEOPLE WHO ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR CREATING THE PRODUCT. We think this opens up worlds of advantages for everyone.
I invite all of you to look at the documentation available on our site, and see what you think. We love open source...we're running the whole site on massive Linux x86 boxes, and have extensively used open source tools to create the code and provide the supporting utilities (sendmail, CVS, etc.).
Here are some links that explain a bit more about how things work:
You can also write us at support@NOSPAM.asynchrony.com if you have other questions you want answered.
Nate McKie
nate.mckie@NOSPAM.asynchrony.com
CTO, asynchrony.com
P.S. Asynchrony.com was created without the use of Microsoft software...