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

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?

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.

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.)

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.