Why Do Open Source?

harryhoch writes "The NY Times is reporting that a couple of business-school researchers at MIT and Harvard have written a report on motivations for participation in open source projects. Among their somewhat-obvious insights is the somewhat-obvious comment that some folks work on open-source as a way to gain professional prestige. " I love talking heads - but again, it is interesting to see outside sources commenting on the growth of the free software/open source movement.

Comments

depends on what your intentions are

[laugau]

open source is the quickest way to put together new and exciting software, or to get a good rep. Depending on your strategy, you can use it to make money (though indirectly). So the obvious saying is, why NOT opensource...

Re:depends on what your intentions are

[Pfhreakaz0id]

why NOT opensource?

Becuase I can DIRECTLY make a living at writing closed source software. I can't write opensource here and make money. I suppose I could do it in my "spare" time, but I prefer to spend it with my wife and son. If I have time left over, I will study to learn some new skill which will make me more money when I take my next job. Or certification.

I guess I'm just a selfish bastard, huh? I spent five years being an "idealistic" reporter making jackshit. I give to charities like NPR and the like when I feel like being idealistic, not write code, sorry.
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Re:depends on what your intentions are

[Pfhreakaz0id]

code that looks good? Listen, I don't give a shit what my code "looks like" or if it impresses someone. I write in VB 'cause it just works and I could care less what the C++ gods say. What matters is what does your code accomplish? A computer, a programming language, an OS, a databse is just a tool, a means to an end, not an end to itself. I've written code that runs multi-million dollar manufacturing lines, automatically reporting production based off bar scans on the line, keeping data in 12 different databases in sync with transactions, automattically flowing stuff into an ancient accounting system. It works. It's a hack and a half because it was based on code half done and crappy access databases but the client wouldn't pay to have it done "right", they just wanted it done. To paraphrase Robert M. Pirsig, it has high quality because it works, not because of the materials/tools used to assemble it.
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Resume

[Valdrax]

Maybe I'm a cynic, but has anyone else considered contributing to an open source project as a way of building up their resume? For example, I'm kind of a Mac guy, and I've considered a number of times working on or starting a port of various popular open source projects to the Mac as a way of learning the APIs and as a way of demonstrating to future employers that I have the skills necessary.

Is it wrong to contribute to open source for those reasons? It seems kind of against the whole FSF philosophy, but I'm a bit too much of a pragmatist anyway. Has anyone else started on open source for these reasons?

Re:Resume

[Shaheen]

I have worked on an open source project, and have placed it on my resume. I did not work on the project for those particular reasons, though.

In this day and age, I find that my classmates at school, while some are very smart, can not find a good internship. This is because a company can not be sure what they are getting for an intern based on grades alone - getting good grades doesn't necessarily mean they'll do well in your company.

On the other hand, I have found that it has never been difficult for me to get a job, or at the very least considered for one up until the final round of cuts. I truly believe that the coding I have done (for Litestep) has helped me get better jobs than ones I would have had otherwise.

not ground breaking

[mudpup]

It's not a ground breaking report but it is good to see open source getting more study and that study getting reported in the NYTimes.

Dennis

Re:Other site for report?

[mat catastrophe]

if you don't want to register, try one of the 'cyberpunk' accounts... login: cyberpunk69 passwd: cyberpunk69 it should work for you....

Preposterous

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an Open Source Programmer, so I think that I know what motivates me. I am also a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO), and yes, that does make me a "card-carrying commie". I perfer Open Source Software because it is the only form of software licensing and design which truly conforms to Marx's ideals: there is no special class of "developers" who weild power over users. Rather, everyone involved in the end product, programmers, users, documentation writers, even lawyers, can have a say.

Further, it is the only system based on the socialist ideas of equality and egalitarianism. All people, no matter what financial status, have access. Improvments in so-called "intellectual" property can be shared easily among many people without the interference of those in power who would profit by restraining new ideas.

While many Slashdot readers are simply terrified at the thought that there are actual communists using Linux, they should bear in mind that the leader of the Free Software Movement, Richard Stallman, is essentially a believer in socialism. Your movement was founded by communists, and we still persist today.

Re:Preposterous

[dillon_rinker]

This is one of the best trolls I've seen in a long time.

Heheheh....

[Ranger Rick]

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," writes Eric S. Raymond, a programmer and movement observer, in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." I'm sorry, but I couldn't stop laughing when I saw that ESR is a "movement observer". (Ewwwwwww....) I prefer to have my movements in complete privacy, thank you!

The article is important because it's not for us.

[XLawyer]

Both the New York Times article and the paper it describes are important precisely because they're not written for nerds. They're written for business people, and they're the ones who decide what gets installed and used. Even if tech people at your company have ultimate decision-making authority, they have it because the business people have delegated it to them, and the tech people are responsible to the business people for their decisions.

So the article and paper are useful because they help explain what is counter-intuitive: how software written by geeks in their spare time can be any good. Not only does it explain their motivation, it also points out that the people who are most likely to contribute to open-source are the top programmers, the ones the business people are desperate to hire.

The point is that articles and papers like these make using open-source an easier decision.

(And personally, I like Postrel's other point, which is that people acting primarily for their own benefit, whether psychological or pecuniary, can also confer substantial benefits on the rest of the world. Too many people ignore the invisible hand these days.)

Re:Royalties largely aren't necessary

[Nicolas MONNET]

For all we know, he's probably not even a programmer. 'nuff said.

Why do they assume motives are selfish?

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Maybe some people just do open source software to make the world better? Greed and self-aggrandizement are not the only human motivators.

Giving software costs the giver only his time, and for his time he may improve the lives of millions of people.

There's also the pure satisfaction of creating something of worth.

Open software people are simply a class of people for which there is more to life than looking out for number 1.

Re:Why do they assume motives are selfish?

[Master of Kode Fu]

The good feeling that one gets from finishing a software project and releasing it to the world is just as selfish a motive as "greed" or "self-aggrandizement" (which are unfair generalizations of wanteing to make a living and wanting to be rec ognized). In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the satisfaction on gets from releasing open source software is a fulfillment of the highest-level need in his hierarchy, the need of self-actualization:

Self-actualizing people are... involved in a cause outside their own skin. The are devoted, work at something, something very precious to them--some calling or vocation, in the old sense, the priestly sense. When you select out of a careful study, very fine and healthy people, strong people, creative people, saintly people, sagacious people... you get a different view of mankind. You ask how tall can people grow, what can a human being become?

Maslow also describes self-actualization as a person's need to be and do that which the person was born to do. It is his "calling". "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write."

...and open source programmers must write open source software. I don't know about you, but that sounds selfish to me! After all, it is called self-actualization...

Simply put, there is a "good" kind of selfishness too, and that is the selfishness practiced by healthy, self-actualized people. They are selfish, but make sure their selfishness doesn't step on other people. On the other side of the coin, those with martyrdom complexes -- you've probably met them, they're the "completely selfless people who look out for others before themselves" -- are ironically the most parasitic, burdensome and draining people you'll ever meet. They too are trying to become self-actaulized, but in a destructive way.

Writing open source software is a selfish act; it's just that it's one that benefits more people than just oneself.

Re:Why do they assume motives are selfish?

[anonymous cowerd]

If it selfish to want to do something for your own profit and it's selfish to do something for a "higher" (i.e. non-profit-oriented) goal which fulfills this mysterious, vague need for "self-actualization" (which sounds to me a lot like "one's need to do what one wants to do"), then after all that, can you name one conscious act which is not motivated by some variety or other of selfishness? If you can't, then if all volitional acts are motivated by selfishness, doesn't "selfish" become an entirely superfluous word? Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

Re:Why do they assume motives are selfish?

[gilroy]

Quoth the poster:

The good feeling that one gets from finishing a software project and releasing it to the world is just as selfish a motiveas "greed" or "self-aggrandizement" ... Simply put, there is a "good" kind of selfishness too, and that is the selfishness practiced by healthy, self-actualized people. They are selfish, but make sure their selfishness doesn't step on other people.

I see this a lot, and I simply have a problem with it. People seem to say that, by definition, you do things only through self-interest. Then they invent things like the warm, fuzzy feeling or the satisfaction of a commitment fulfilled, and use them to justify the assumption that there is a selfish motive involved.

Either this statement is true but meaningless -- it's true for all interactions and thus distinguishes none -- or it's deep but untrue. Some people some of the time do some actions for reasons that I think cannot be accurately labeled "selfish".

So here's "gilroy's hierarchy of motivation":

* Most people can be motivated only by considering themselves as the most important (or only!) factor in the Universe. They choose their actions without regard for what it does to others, and if they help others, it is only to hedge their bets against future need.

* A minority of people are motivated by their sense of the universal. Leaving behind the grounding in their baser selfish instincts, they see the Other as more important than themselves. They subjugate their own needs to the needs of the Other. If they look after themselves (for example, drawing a salary while working at a non-profit), it is only to provide the necessities required for continuing their work. These are the martyrs.

* A very, very few manage to slip past that fallacy, too. They value the individual, and since they too are individuals, they value themselves. They balance the needs of the Other against the needs of the Self and figure a best-fit path walking between them. They recognize that there are times that they, as human beings as well, are entitled to respect and protection.

That last is a tough, slippery line to walk. But no one said this would be easy.

why I do it.

[romco]

I sell services and solutions....not software.

This allows me to use open source software, improve it, (or bastardize it) and give my clients a more cost effective solution.

I make more money.
The customer pays less.
I add to the overall OSS software base.

Life is good.

Open source..

[meff]

Linux is extremely popular because it is totally free and of the large software base supporting it.

GNU is the group of programmers that make all the programs for Linux, and one of the requirements for making a program under the GNU license is that the program must be free and the source must be available to everyone.

"One of the main differences in the varients of Unix between Linux is that almost all Linux software is open source, which with Unix this is usually not true." Says the GNU group..

This kind of thinking is very smart in the OS arena, making the source available to programmers can help advance other programmers' skills to a higher point, and thus in the end you get higher quality software from everyone. Everyone helps everyone else, this is the way life should be..

-meff

Open Source Software == fun

[Witt]

The article suggests that fun couldn't be the sole motivating factor.

For me, I would have to say it is.

The reason I'm paying massive amounts of money for university tuition to pursue a computer science degree is that I think school is fun, and I think computer science is fun.

Working on software projects is also something I enjoy. And there's nothing quite as gratifying as seeing your hard work produce an amazingly cool piece of software in the end.

So yeah, I do it for fun. Money doesn't really motivate me - as long as I can pay the bills and buy a cool toy every once in a while, I'm not concerned.

I suspect I'm not alone among slashdotters, either.

Re:Open Source Software == fun

[clearcache]

Well, I think we're seeing the effects of a group of people (some of us /.ers) not fully understanding the lingo/assumptions of another group of people (economists). As an econ major-turned programmer, I think I get their drift a bit. Their paper isn't that far off.

The economist in me says that we're all "rationally self-interested people" who make decisions (buying and selling -- products, ourselves, whatever) based on our own self-interests. Whether the benefit we get from Open Source work is monetary, fun, ego-boosting, or other, individuals do derive a benefit from it. The fact that the benefit can not be easily quantified (as in your "fun" example) does not make their theories null and void. Personally, I think it's fun, too, and that adds to any monetary benefit I may have received.

Nothing about the article/paper is groundbreaking, so I wouldn't call it a great academic achievement. But, it does put the spotlight -- in a very positive manner -- on Open Source in a very public arena...the paper is groundbreaking for that very reason.

But you raise an interesting point: can fun be the _sole_ motivating factor? I don't think so, either. You said as long as you can pay the bills, it's not a motivating factor. What you're really saying (at least to me) is that money is a motivating factor _in how you spend your time_, but it's not your sole motivating factor. If you can cover the bills, you will forego additional money as long as you get fun in return...a very wise philosophy.

In economic terms, you have reached a point where the marginal benefit you would receive by working a little more for $ is not greater than the marginal benefit you get from working for fun. And, if you really wanted to try to quantify your fun, you could look at the opportunity cost of your time spent having fun. It wouldn't be perfect, but you'd have some quantifiable measure of "fun"...which does fit into their theories.

So...back to you...you have a balance of $-motivated work and fun-motivated work. Great! It's tough to get that balance. I've got it too, but my fiancee doesn't understand that, when I'm working at work on a computer it's not always fun, but when I'm working at fun on a computer, it is. She sees the computer as the source of stress...so if I'm on the computer, she tells me to get off...it all depends on what I'm doing on it that makes the difference ;)

Re:Open Source Software == fun

[gilroy]

Quoth the poster: (emphasis added)

So yeah, I do it for fun. Money doesn't really motivate me - as long as I can pay the bills and buy a cool toy every once in a while, I'm not concerned.

And this is why we, as geeks, mystify and terrify the corporate drones. They can't get their minds around the fact that we don't value money (or power, for that matter) the way they do. We have other goals in life and so we have slipped off the chain of the modern industrial machinery. In doing so we have slipped below their radar, too.

Fun is an all-too-often overlooked reason for people to do things (OSS being an example, but only one). All the drones and most of the sheep would be shocked if you were to say, "I enjoy my work. I like what I'm doing". In the modern world, you can be pleasured but you cannot have fun -- fun is random, and individual, and cannot be reduced to a bar graph and a bottom line. Fun cannot be marketed, and so corporations must spend literally billions convincing people that so-called entertainment is fun.

And as geeks, we must not imagine we are alone in this stance. Our allies are few, too few, but they are powerful. They are musicians and artists, writers and poets, teachers and preachers -- those motivated by a love of what they do and a passion for life and for human enrichment and a corresponding disdain for consumerism and corporatism. Together we all hover on the margin, in the society but not of it, witness to its excess and its own loud silence, its final utter futility. We observe the corporate world and its tainted society and we wonder what happens when it finally collapses in on itself.

But by living on the margins, we also happen to ring the beast. And if -- no, when -- we all wake up from our enforced slumber -- when all those on the edge, living life for the sake of living -- finally link hands, the days of corporatism will be numbered. We will have surrounded and removed our enemy -- by cooption, by the example of a better way. To end a long rant, let me reiterate: It is all about the fun. That is the key that keeps this movement, like others, going forward.

Re:Open Source Software == fun

[gilroy]

Quoth the poster (with my earlier stuff in italics):

And this is why we, as geeks, mystify and terrify the corporate drones. They can't get their minds around the fact that we don't value money (or power, for that matter) the way they do.

You either live in a fantasy world or you're 12 years old. In either case, you're flat ignorant if you think this attitude of yours is a good one. Money makes the world go around my friend. If you don't want to live in a trailor park and feed your kids chicken noodle soup from a can for the rest of your life, I suggest you realize that.

Well, I am considerably older than 12 -- by a factor of 250% or so -- so I supposed the conclusion is that I live in a fantasy world. :)

Seriously, I think the poster missed something I said, perhaps because of the inserted parenthetical. So I repeat myself, at the risk of being rude:

They can't get their minds around the fact that we don't value money ... the way they do.

NB: I don't say geeks don't value money. They like money, to have a decent place to live, or to afford cool vacations, or (more likely than not) to buy more neato hardware. But money is not an end in itself, and neither is material accumulation. As such, geeks can get off the treadmill -- they have a point where they can say, "I have enough." Sheep almost never do this. Droids cannot do this -- to them, the rat race is all there is.

Admittedly, as the poster points out, my philosophy sounds pretty pie-in-the-sky. It certainly doesn't sound like it should be viable ... but I believe it is. Notice that I say I believe it is, not that I can prove it.

I can only speak for myself, of course, but my material needs are close to being met, and I'm not even in a hugely high-paying job. In fact, I am a teacher at a private school, which (as those in education will tell you) is a recipe for unmet material needs. :)

And finally, I'm glad I made someone laugh. I, for one, don't really thnk what I'm saying is laughable, but hey, your mileage may vary. If my original post has brought a little more laughter into the world, it has already repaid me manifold.

Show Me The Metrics!

[mdb31]

It's easy to get all sarcastic about this paper, but I think it would be an interesting exercise to come up with some truly convincing reasons to do Open Source, as well as the numbers to support them

I mean, the FSF is quite clear about what it wants to achieve, and questionable though those goals might be for some, it at least gives them a purpose. What is the goal in life for the Open Source movement?

Could Linux have succeeded as a closed source product, if the same brilliant team of developers could have been assembled and convinced to release the product for free? Or Apache? Why does a seemingly brilliant Open Source project like Mozilla only enjoy such limited success?

And: How many people are actually taking advantage of the Source part of the Open Source equation, not just the Open/Free part? Is there anything more to the Linux hype than that it provides low-income hackers with cool stuff to play with?

Now, don't get me wrong: although the questions are a bit tainted, this is definitely not flamebait. Having some real answers and real statistics here would really help a lot to advance Open Source. If you're a college student in the IT or statistics field, this sounds like a great project to me...

A deeply flawed study

[raph]

The paper referred to in this story, "The Simple Economics of Open Source", has many serious flaws. For one, it contains some basic mistakes. It confuses the roles of the GPL and the DFSG, suggesting that the DFSG is itself a license, and one more liberal than the GPL at that. It states that the GPL is losing ground now, as many developers are moving to the DFSG. These statements go beyond merely wrong to the point of fundamental misunderstanding.

They also downplay the successes of the Mozilla project, at one point claiming that it's only had a dozen or so outside contributions. This will come as surprising news to anyone familiar with actual Mozilla development.

I had a lot of problems with the paper at a deeper level, as well. The actual content of the paper is largely a restatement of esr's "ego-boo" theory in economics terms. To the basic concept of professional reputation, they add the economic value of the credential from the educational experience. This is a step in the right direction, as learning is a very important and generally underreported reason for working on open source, but still to my mind focusses too much on the "signalling" and not enough on the thirst for knowledge and understanding.

But the single greatest failing of the paper is that it doesn't recognize that work on free software is fundamentally different than work on proprietary software. It's not hard to see how outsiders can miss this, as after all the end-user fruits of free software development can be compared head-to-head against proprietary counterparts (Linux kernel against NT kernel, Gcc against MSVC, Apache against IIE or other proprietary servers, Gimp against Photoshop). However, the other "work products" of free software development are just as important, if not more so. These include the understanding of the software and the communication of this understanding to the rest of the community. It is here that Samba differs so dramatically from Microsoft's own implementations of SMB, or that wv differs from whatever wad of code Microsoft uses to parse their own formats.

You also see the differences in the grand cooperative vision shared by so many free software developers. Free software is working towards everything working with everything else (although this is of course a fantastically difficult problem, so we're not quite there yet). Proprietary software often sacrifices this goal for the sake of short-term business incentives.

The paper asks (and attempts to answer) the question, "why do people work on free software, when it's possible to get paid for working on proprietary software?" I believe it might be interesting to consider the following analogous questions:

• Why do people play musical instruments (non-professionally) when it's possible to get all the music you want from your Tower Records store, at a cost much lower than the opportunity cost of the time spent?
  
  
• Why do people work as scientists, when it's possible to work as an engineer in the corresponding field, often at a much higher pay?
  
  
• Why do people teach, or write, when it's possible to simply practice the field?
  
  

In summary, I consider the questions raised by the paper interesting, but the framework in which they're posed has problems, and the actual analysis presented suffers from both factual errors and lack of detailed understanding of the free software process and community.

Incidentally, I was all set to post an extended version of this critique to Advogato as part of a series of articles on the economics of software (previous articles have covered software complexity and risk homeostasis), but no interest was shown.

Re:Other site for report?

[Flerg]

Alternatively, just use the partners link here. I'm pretty sure it doesn't require an account.

-Flerg

Reasons: Right and Wrong ones?

[jabber]

Are you suggesting that the intention of contributing to open source development is in any way important?

That's almost like asking WHY give to charity?

Is it more Right to give to charity to lessen human suffering, and more Wrong to give to charity to shave a few hundred bucks off your income to drop down by one tax bracket??

I see no conflict here, since the charity still benefits. Wether one is primarily motivated to do Good for selfish reasons, or for purely philandrophic ones, makes little difference.

The End does not always justify the Means, not by a long shot. But if what you do is Good, then your personal reasons for doing this Good are irrelevant, since the Good is still done.

On a more metaphysical level, I am of the belief that EVERYONE does Good for selfish reasons. Even Mother Teresa heals lepers for the benefit of the warm fuzzies of knowing that "I am a Good person", or "I am making God happy" or whatever. Yes, the lepers benefit, but the personal satisfaction of helping the lepers - and not actually helping the lepers - is the driver for the act. Not the recognition one receives, but the internal, emotional 'dopamine rush' of satisfaction with one's Goodness.. ramble-ramble...

Self-sacrifice can be selfish. Benefit the community as a side-effect of pumping up your resume. We'll all be grateful.

Economics and the obvious

[Silver A]

The original paper is at http://www.people.hbs.edu/jlerner/simple.pdfAmong their somewhat-obvious insights is the somewhat-obvious comment that some folks work on open-source as a way to gain professional prestige.Business schools and economists have a reputation for having a firm grasp upon the obvious. However, the reason they stay in business, and aren't laughed out of intelligent company, is that so many people, especially other academics, don't.People don't work for free. Sometimes, though, they are willing to take their rewards in a purely non-monetary fashion. In the case of politics, power is the reward. For many other people, the sense of satisfaction they receive from doing something useful is sufficient reward for lots of hard work. Ask any insightful volunteer coordinator at the Red Cross or other charity. Open source software is a form of charity - one is providing a "benefit to humanity" or other warm-fuzzy, while doing something which is interesting and challenging, and not receiving money for it. I hope the biz school professors who wrote the report are familiar with the literature on charity and non-economic motivation.Of course, sometimes working on open-source can have economic motives. If I'm looking for a job, and I can point to my work on hWidgetFoo, I'll likely get a better(-paying) job than if I can't point to it. If I've been working on software for internal consumption, like at a manufacturer, there may not be a directly work-related product I can point to and say "Here's what I can do".Both points are addressed in the paper, but most of it can be summed up by a quote from ESR near the beginning:The "utility function" Linux hackers is maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers.Good economists recognize that non-economic incentives exist, but many economists ignore them because they're too hard to quantify.

Re:Economics and the obvious

[Animats]

Yeah, the paper is here..

Now there's an open-source project that's needed: an open-source replacement for Adobe Craprobat. Acrobat does only two things, display documents and send them to a printer, and it does both badly. There's an opportunity here. (No, DocBook isn't the answer.)

It's worth noting that most open-source projects are in areas where there are already commercial products, but the commercial products have problems that aren't being fixed. We don't generally see open-source projects breaking new ground. Linux, after all, is Unix Reimplementation #4.

or, you're like me...

[option8]

or, you're like me and have a nifty idea, but know you can't get it done (or done well) by yourself.

say you are working on a project whose scope is beyond your capacities, but you know that other people on the internet would be interested in its completion, and maybe even contribute some code. eventually, you could charge for the product, but for the moment (as it's not done yet, and still buggy as hell) you feel better about making it free (beer) so you decide that, while you're at it to make it Free (open).

it's not just a matter of prestige. hell, i don't know if the names attached to a GPLd widget are professors, professionals, or teenage hackers. they all have the same position in my mind - that of Somebody Who Codes Better Than Me.

The article has one serious oversite

[Kenneth]

There is one other serious oversite in the article as to motivations for contributing to open source projects.

The original authors of most open source projects seem to have needed the particular piece of software they were writing. They also didn't care about potential economic gain from said software.

She quotes "The Cathederal and the Bazarr", but she missed one of the most important points for undertaing the fetchmail project used as the example in that essay. ESR needed a decent program to handle certian email problems. Most programs had some things he needed, and taken together pretty much every needed feature was covered, but no single program had all of the needed features. He wrote fetchmail because he needed it.

He also didn't have the time and energy to debug it properly. Turning to open source projects for many things creates instant feedback. If you have a good idea that is valuable, it will be improved by a huge number of people. Their motivation? It would make their lives easier too.

This seems to be the true reason for contributing to an Open Source or Free Software project.

Why did Linus create Linux? DOS sucked. Minix sucked. He needed something to suit his purposes. It turned out that it also suited the purposes of many other people. They saw the potential in Linux, saw where it needed imrovement, and contributed. Not because of alturism, or to get better known (although that is a factor), but because they also needed it as a tool.

If you look at any of the other high profile open source projects (Apache, Perl, etc.) You will find that people are contributing to those because they find them very useful, and would find the contributions they make useful as well. Once you have something that works, why not share?

If you keep the source to yourself, you might be able to sell it, on the other hand you might not. You may also just find yourself in competition with a large corperation who would think nothing of doing whatever they can to see to it that you never get your program out. Open Sourceing a project is essentially opening a pandora's box. Once you let it out, no one can put it back in.

These are the real motivatioins for Open Source. Not because it's fun (although that is a factor), not for prestige (although that is also a factor), but because you need that software to accomplish a particular task, and it's too difficult to do by your self. Since a lot of other people would be able to use the same software to accomplish the same task, they are more than willing to help if it gets them closer to their goal.

In his presentation ESR has everyone who programs for a living stand up. Then he has everyone who programs for a living, and their company depends upon selling the software that they have written.

In the presentation I saw, the first question had more than half of the room standing. I would estimate that over 100 people stood. The second question had four people stand up. Most people write code to accomplish a specific purpose. Once that purpose is accomplished, they see nothing wrong with giving it away. Their incentive has already been met.

You got to know why

[Arandir]

Before you open source, you got to know why. Especially if you're a commercial firm.

For non-commercial folks, the reasons are very easy to find. You're a hobbyist and open source is like a big hobby meet. You're a researcher and open source fits into your notions of public disemination and peer review.

But commercial interests need to take a good look at it. You will not earn profits off of software sales. You have to think of something else to generate the revenues needed to pay your developers, testers, supportniks and marketroids. Something else is going to have to generate the dividends for your stock holders. If your primary business is hardware, open source is a no-brainer. Ditto if you can use your open source as a loss-leader for other products.

But if you really want to be in the software business and not the support or hardware business, you'll need to come up with a whole new business model. So far, none of the large Linux businesses have earned a profit. The market knows this and their stocks are in the tank. Like it or not, you have to sell something to earn a profit. If you give away your software, you have to sell something else. Maybe 100% open source is not the best solution for you. Maybe a mix is better. Sometimes you might even come to the realization that open source just won't work for you.

Just remember, you no longer competing with Microsoft, Sun and Apple. You're also competing with weekend hobbyists and college students. And your commercial competitors get to distribute your stuff in their shrinkwrap boxes. And SuSE will include it on CD #5 without even a registration card. If you can come up with a business model that will work, you'll be everyone's hero.

Passion

[TheTomcat]

They seem to have missed a little something-something here.

In my experience with opensource, the points they made are correct. Often, OSS is conceived due to a need. But that is not always the case.

More often, though, I think that opensource software is created because the notion of an idealistic world. And programmers have a passion for what they do. It's often this passion that drives projects like the Gimp. Someday, sure, the gimp may be noted as an acceptable tool by the graphic arts industry. Right now, to most people, the gimp is a toy. It's something to use to create flashy web graphics and interfaces, but it's market share of REAL, PAYING, PROFESSIONAL jobs is virtually nil.

The Gimp's development is a passion of it's parents (the coders). It's the vision of an ideal software-world, where we don't have to shell out $995 for Adobe Photoshop, AND we can see how the software works, AND we can fix it if it breaks, or add a feature, if it won't do something.

Open source software development is built on a precedent of programmers who LOVE what they do. Period.

Economics and the obvious, take 2

[Silver A]

(My original post got the tags stripped by a combination of browser, slashdot, and user error. Here's what it's supposed to look like:)

The original paper is at http://www.people.hbs.edu/jlerner/simple.pdf

Among their somewhat-obvious insights is the somewhat-obvious comment that some folks work on open-source as a way to gain professional prestige.

Business schools and economists have a reputation for having a firm grasp upon the obvious. However, the reason they stay in business, and aren't laughed out of intelligent company, is that so many people, especially other academics, don't.

People don't work for free. Sometimes, though, they are willing to take their rewards in a purely non-monetary fashion. In the case of politics, power is the reward. For many other people, the sense of satisfaction they receive from doing something useful is sufficient reward for lots of hard work. Ask any insightful volunteer coordinator at the Red Cross or other charity. Open source software is a form of charity - one is providing a "benefit to humanity" or other warm-fuzzy, while doing something which is interesting and challenging, and not receiving money for it. I hope the biz school professors who wrote the report are familiar with the literature on charity and non-economic motivation.

Of course, sometimes working on open-source can have economic motives. If I'm looking for a job, and I can point to my work on hWidgetFoo, I'll likely get a better(-paying) job than if I can't point to it. If I've been working on software for internal consumption, like at a manufacturer, there may not be a directly work-related product I can point to and say "Here's what I can do".

Both points are addressed in the paper, but most of it can be summed up by a quote from ESR near the beginning:

The "utility function" Linux hackers is maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers.

Good economists recognize that non-economic incentives exist, but many economists ignore them because they're too hard to quantify.

I've always thought that...

[ch-chuck]

"Hackerdom is a ruthless meritocracy, dedicated to winnowing out bad code and spreading good."

I've often thought that the reason some companies like Msft churn out bad software is that: it's relatively easy to fool your supervisor - i.e., if you have a project deadline looming and you know some part isn't done or hasn't been tested enough, you can let it slide, the boss remains clueless, the customers and tech support have to deal with it - yet your boss may still be under the false impression that you've done a really swell job! Hidden deep in inscrutable code lies lots of opportunity for office politics and shifting blame that open source scientific peer review just doesn't tolerage, at least not for long!

I asked a silly question (Re: Why against?)

[Valdrax]

I always thought Stallman pretty much spoke for the FSF on the philosophy section, but realize I may have made an incorrect assumption. I thought the FSF wanted all software to be free for it's own sake as a free speech issue -- you know, code for it's own sake.

Guess what, the more I try to reconstruct what I was thinking when I posted that line, the less sense it makes. Of course there's no problem with it! <smacks self on forehead>

I also phrased that a bit poorly as it seems I was making the ethics a big issue, when I was really wanting to know how many others got into OSS development for resume building purposes.

Re:I asked a silly question (Re: Why against?)

[UnknownSoldier]

> I always thought Stallman pretty much spoke for the FSF on the philosophy section, but realize I may have made an incorrect assumption. I thought the FSF wanted all software to be free for it's own sake as a free speech issue -- you know, code for it's own sake.

No, you didn't make an incorrect assumption. Stallman wishes all software was open source.

*Points to evidence -->

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free. html

and

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/should befree.html

While it is a lofty goal to have all software with the freedom of source and copyleft, Stallman seems to think the right of the developer should be "restricted" for the greater good. As a liberterain, I don't think that's right to "deny" someone the freedom on the basis of the rest of society.

Cheers

How about doing it for education..

[JohnnyCannuk]

One of the things I see missing from this large list of reasons is education.

Many people create open source to "scratch an itch" and some do it to show that 'it' (what ever the it is) can be done. Most do it because they enjoy programming and a challenge.

I for one got into it because I like programming. And I was wondering how Photoshop worked or how different Window systems were coded. Well, Adobe and MS/APPLE were not about to let me in on their source, but E and the Gimp were happy to. I think, as a result (of actually reading real-world code), I'm a beter programmer. I have concrete examples of how things are done by comercial quality software products for use in my own projects (the knowledge not nesessarily the code).

What does it cost me? Time and the responisbility to one day give something back to the community that educated me. I can either work on an Open Source Project myself, or buy from companies that support and do open source. I can convince my company that it makes good business sense to use Linux/Apache/Tomcat/Java solutions for e-business rather than MS/ASP - then I would actually get paid to do open source.

All this and I get one hell of a good window manager and graphics editor - better than what I could buy.

Reasons to give *do* matter. Drug money donations?

[Cmdr Taco]

The End does not always justify the Means, not by a long shot. But if what you do is Good, then your personal reasons for doing this Good are irrelevant, since the Good is still done.

This is completely untrue.

Would you, as a charity, knowingly accept money made from drug sales? From hired assanations? From child prostitution? The money will be used to do good, so there's no problem, right? Wrong. There has to be a conscience in accepting charity. Why they give and where they got what they're giving **does** matter. Otherwise it can lead to bad results such as:

Ever wondered why drug lords haven't been stopped in Colombia? They're evil and we know who they and where they are right? Why not to bust them? Well, that's the US Media view of it. Locally, in Colombia, the drug czars give copiously to many local charity groups, sponsor youth soccer groups, build or donate land to local churches, contribute to fund 30% of the local hospital's operating costs. Arresting the drug dealer would hurt local folk because the drugs are heavily woven into the local economy. Busting the dealer destroys the town. Ask these people if they want the drug lord busted. They'll say no. And the politicians who represent these townspeople know that they can't risk offending their constituents, so the corruption perkalates right to the top, all because people turn a blind eye to the reasons for where their donations come from.

Re:Reasons to give *do* matter. Drug money donatio

[jabber]

Well, let's turn tables a little more.

Say you're a poor, welfare receiving parent of a child in dire need of an expensive operation. Do you care where the money comes from?

I know that it's pretty extreme to compare that situation to open source, but really... Who really cares if code is written and released for 1)building own knowledge and skills, 2)beefing up a resume, 3) greater common good, 4) penance for past piracy, 5) the desire to attain status in the OSS community (Karma whoring).

1) is a respectable reason, since the redistribution of code is voluntary. A skill-polishing coder, if they do not release their product, are not in violation of the GPL, and so do not HAVE to release the source.

2) is a respectable reason, but you must release product and code as proof of posession of skills you put on a resume. Can't just say "I wrote a portal site, so I have these skills. Pay me." You CAN say, "Go to slashdot.org, *I* did that. Here's the code that makes it go, as proof of my qualifications." If you base on GLP, you must release your work - but what of the reason? The source is free, you're deemed qualified, we're all happy.

3) Insert my metaphysics quip here. Doing something for the 'common good' is BS; things are done for the satisfaction of having done them 'for the common good'. I get a rush for thinking in 'Utilitarian' terms, for example; it's an application of the theory.

4) Guilt and conscience suck. Until we learn to ignore them, we will do good to balance the scales. :) This is a very arguable point, but you can't say that you can't fathom it being a real reason. And hey! The source is free, so maybe the motivation of giving others an alternative to piracy isn't such a bad one.

5) ESR, RMS, Perens do this all the time. Witness recent Bruce Perens act of 'making an example' of BeOS. What self-righteousness!! "I am GPL, hear me threaten litigation and steal your thunder!" Grandstanding and self-appeasement by respected people is a pretty good source of temptation - it shows that with enough credibility, you can occasionally shoot your mouth off, and people will still pay attention to you.

Would I take blood-money, knowing it as such, for convenience purposes? NO! For dire need situations? Real tough call...

How about taking it in ignorance, building a life with it, and then finding out it's source? Would I sell my house and car? No. What I would do is skew my life to do Good with the benefits of Bad money.

Oh. Why did Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gates, et al give generously to charity? Do we care? Guilt for their good fortune? Maybe. Realization that past a certain amount, it makes no difference, so others might as well benefit? Maybe. Realization that you can't take it with you, so others might as well benefit? Maybe. Guilt for having exploited others to get the wealth? Maybe. Divine Inspiration? Perhaps.

Who really cares, and must we look the proverbial horse in the mouth? Not really - not in the case of OSS, that's for sure. Leach the code, read the code, tweak the code, share the code. Learn from the code to improve yourself and the code. And if the original author wrote it in the hope that it would help him get a better job... What of it?

Tangible Benifits to Open Source Development

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

I own a small development/services company. I try to work in Open Source software as much as possible, which has become the majority of our work.

The biggest benifit we have had with all the Linux IPO's was people asking questions. Most people don't understand Open Source at all, especially those in the traditional IT world.

I have had the most success with finding and explaining tangible business advantages to companies with using and contributing to Open Source projects.

One benifit is that of remote development expertise and tools. In today's labor market it can be very difficult to lure good talent to a location for 3,6 or 12 months, and remote development is not always a great option when using traditional software for development also the quality of these people can be questionable, no matter how good the resume looks. Mozilla's biggest achievement so far is a litany of tools that assist in managing distributed software development. When I can point to Mozilla, Linux, Apache, Perl, GNOME and KDE and talk about how these projects were developed and are maintained through the Internet by distributed developers, business types get big eyes. The pool of developer's is now larger to pull from for development talent, because distributed development is a reality.

Another problem facing companies, is the method with which they go about finding talent. Most use headhunters, you know the schmucks who can do nothing more than match keywords they know nothing about and pick up a phone (It's amazing how many of these people who can't use email). Headhunters manage to deliver dubious quality and tend to be expensive. There are many small businesses such as mine that can perform the work but who lack the inside contacts to get the job. Having internal IT departments use Open Source and participate in the community introduces them to a whole bunch of labor that may or may not be looking for work, or who may know someone who is. Typically one can lean on these relationships to find labor, and have a better idea of the quality they are getting.

One reason that I push for companies to sponsor Open Source projects has a lot of the same reasons as listed above. One project that I am pushing with a client, is remote automated remote administration and maintenance for a large number of database/webservers that will be located at customer sites internationally. They have looked at Tivoli from IBM but it looks like it will not meet their needs. Most likely they will have to develop the project in house. I have proposed that they develop the project as an Open Source project after the initial development is done. Why? Well the initial development will be done by a couple of internal developers that may leave, or move on to other work. If they sponsor the project as Open Source, if this comes around, finding a replacement developer may be as simple as posting to the mailing list for the project. Secondly, what if they need people to do administration and implementation work? Rather than hiring people with general skills and training them, they can simply find people who may already be offering these services as part of their own business. It will generally be much cheaper to contract them out than handle it all in house. Secondly it acts as PR and marketing for the company in question, like the Cluetrain says marketplaces are conversations and conversations create markets.

Another client is a small ISP who needs a lot of management and automation software for their lowest common denominator employee's to manage some of the day to day stuff. The owner is a software developer, and his first thought was to sell this software as a network management system something similar to NetMax and Cobalt et al. My suggestion was that this was not his core business and he would then have to compete with those guys, so why not make it an Open Source project, using the exposure to promote his core business and the find more talent for his core business. This would be preferable than entering a new market to compete with NetMax and Cobalt and everyone else who wants to play this game. After all he is probably the least capitalized out of all the players in question.

I have moral and philisophical reason's to prefer Free (as in speech) Software, but owning a business means that I have to make a business case if I want to stick to my convictions. I think this can be done, and there are many more business idea's that can be extrapolated from the Open Source movement. I don't think that most of them involve "ego-boo" and the less tangible economic benifits that ESR and company have espoused. I think that ESR was the first to try and formalize why this works and really explain it, but I also believe that we are far from understanding all the models that will make Open Source profitable.

So keep banging away guys, we all know deep down inside that Open Source makes sense, we just have to figure out how to explain it to everyone else.
After all, appearently even the economists don't quite get it.

Ah, but the paper is for specialists...

[raph]

Right. Actually, I liked the Postrel article, for the reasons you described. My harsh critique applies to the "Simple Economics of Open Source" paper referenced in the article. This was written as an academic paper, presumably for consumption primarily by other economists. As such, I believe they have a responsibility to get their facts right, as well as to seek deeper understanding of the real issues. So I don't think this is just nitpicking.

Because selling licenses is fundamentally flawed

[xant]

First let me talk about why we USE free software. I can see the reasons for the OSS movement as an expression of some of the laws of physics. OSS is the path of least resistance. Attempting to sell packages of software - of knowledge - which can be copied freely is a path of GREAT resistance. I don't just mean piracy. When someone has the choice to use free software instead of commercial software to perform the same function, she needs GREAT incentives to use the pay software. Therein lies the resistance. The commercial software has to have important features that the free software doesn't have. The answer to the question: then why isn't almost EVERYONE using free software? --is that most people don't have the choice to do so yet. Using Linux requires some technical expertise that isn't required of a windows user, and in the absence of that technical expertise, the user has no choice but to buy Windows.

Now, why do people WRITE free software? Put aside for the moment the issue of community auditing of code -- after all, not all free software has to be open. Free software has utility to the end-user, and is the path of least resistance, as above. People who write free software do so partially for the joy of coding, but mostly for the utility of the end product. That utility, to the coder, is threefold.

1 The software itself. Software generally performs some function, whether it's calculating results and displaying them in a spreadsheet or providing entertainment. The coder probably wrote it to provide utility that wasn't present in any of the software he already owns.

2 The prestige and the clout that comes from having written it. This runs the gamut from 'net cred' to resume-stuffing.

3 The ability to make money off of it.

I can hear you saying "huh?" from the last one. But if you accept my statement that "selling licenses is fundamentally flawed", you had better hope there are ways to make money off of free software or software writing may cease altogether. After all, #1 and #2 can be powerful reasons, but they don't pay rent. How, then do you make money? I suspect we'll start moving to service-based companies. Witness the rise of ASPs, the massively multiplayer online games (few of which are free), and the (admittedly dubious, but widely publicized) success of some of these Internet startups selling everything from bill pay to food delivery. Software will be written to give service providers a service to sell, not for its own sake.

In conclusion, there are very few new ideas in software programming these days. There are some, and I wish there were more, but the vast majority of software products compete on features and implementation, not originality. Features and implementation are what service industries are all about. It seems to me a natural move for software companies to stop trying to sell their software for what it IS, when most commercial software consists of a reorganization of other peoples' ideas, and start selling it for what it can DO.

Re:Open Source isn't necessary.

[Eccles]

Money is almost always the wrong motivation for doing anything.

Perhaps, but I doubt anyone would clean public restrooms for any other reason...

Re:People work on Open Source because they are laz

[gilroy]

Quoth the poster:

Without any basis to back up my claims at all, I will assert that (most) people work on open source because they are lazy.

You say that like it was a bad thing...

There's nothing wrong with being lazy, as long as you are productively lazy. I teach physics -- at least, that's what my contract says I do -- and I spend all year trying to hammer home that point. In physics, properly understood, the goal is to take new phenomena and (as much as possible) understand them in terms of or at least by analogy to known phenomena. Sure, sometimes something totally new comes along ... but even quantum mechanics draws heavily on good old wave motion.

Look to science as an example. Are people being "lazy" learning Newton's Laws or Feynman's QED theory? Shouldn't they just re-invent all that from the ground up? Of course not. That would be worse than silly. You see farther standing on the shoulders of giants.

I cannot comprehend this deep-set cultural obsession with work for its own sake... for doing something, anything, just for the sake of doing something. It's part-and-parcel with the mentality that work can't and shouldn't be fun or impassioned or interesting. The separation between "work" and "play" is one of the most unfortunate schisms in human history.

Re:Money is necessary and motivates here's why

[gilroy]

Quoth the poster: (emphasis added)

Money defines us.

And there, in a nutshell, is the defining belief of modern corporatism/consumerism. Here, in my own opinion, is the competing antithesis, the core belief of the FSOS movement and of humanism in general:

Not all values are economic values.

I can't speak for others, least of all the poster, but I can say that money doesn't define me. With my background, my credentials, and my skills, I could be pulling in a much larger salary ... perhaps nearly double. If money defined me, I sure as heck wouldn't have opted to become a high school teacher and I wouldn't be sweating every day for low pay.

I do it because (a) it's important; (b) I'm good at it; and (c) I enjoy it.

Money facilitates my life. Would I like a new machine? Sure. Do I like to spend money on books or trips? Sure. So do I expect a living wage, a chance not to sweat every night over my bills? Of course. (Do I receive it? Well... :) )

Further sayeth the poster:

If I don't get enough money to support my computer hardware habbits then most likely development will suffer or maybe I don't have enough to buy technical books or whatever. Also similar to many Americans my psychological well being rests on getting money and avoiding the state that comes from not having money. This is just logic pure and simple.

If your pyschological well-being rests on getting money, I feel little but pity for you. Your life must be so empty and fearful that I cannot imagine it. If, on the other hand, your life is not, then I'm sure looking hard enough we'd find things more important to you than money.

Either way, it isn't logic. It's just the peculiarities of your own personal history. The peculiarities of my history lead me to the job I do.

And finally the poster offers:

spending your entire life giving only to realize at the end of the day that you have nothing yourself is a severe blow to personal progress.

to which I reply:
No, spending your entire life slaving only to realize at the end of your days that you have nothing but little green pieces of paper -- no fond memories, no loved ones nearby, no lasting contribution to humanity -- that must be a severe blow.