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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.
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?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
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.
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.)
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...
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:
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.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
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.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
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.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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.
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha