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Who Works In Gated Communities?
interstar asks: "This report in Upside Today suggests that big software companies are attracted by the "gated community" model - unsurprisingly as it seems to be classic "help us debug our software and we'll keep the copyright, thanks". Upside (in my opinion, naively) presumes that because this idea is attractive to software companies, who will invest in it, it's obviously going to take off. But is this likely? Who works for gated community projects, and why? If it's just for the "bounty" isn't this just programmers working as contractors? Surely for there to be any special open source goodness, these projects must attract collaboration over and above that which is payed for. But are they? And why should I contribute to a gated community rather than a true open source one?" Such a model seems awfully one-sided to me. Sure the software companies like it, but what do the developers get out of it?
B) Every home in the comunity has a "open through licence" printed on the front door limiting the terms of use of that house.
C) When walking down the street, comunity residence are encouraged to give hail hitler salute while clicking their heals together and saying "Hail Balmer".
D) When residence of the comunity look out the windows of their homes, internitently the windows will turn blue with the text "this window has performed an illegal operation. Further use of this window will make windows unstable.".
When residence complain, microsoft insists that these new "variable tint windows" is an inovation of household engineering and nobody, not even the DOJ, can prevent them from inovating in this competitve window market.
E) At the comunity block party, Steve Balmer insists on drinking to much, and embarassing himself by pissing on Mr. Gates lawn.
___
Sounds to me like you'd get more money doing that than you will working in Open Source. And while money isn't everything, it's nice to be able to eat, not to mention that geekiness can be rather expensive to fund. Perhaps as the open source market grows more, we'll see significant money flow into it (besides those goofy ipo's). Till then, maybe it's better to work for some company, and then open source in whatever free time you can scrape up. Seems to me that's how it's worked for a while.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I manage software development for a very small "gated community", as the article calls it, and I have to say that the copyright policies never come into discussion when I interview candidates for positions. I just don't find a level of awareness amongst conventional Windows programmers. For example, in our local user's group for our development platform, we were doing a show-and-tell on web sites, and nobody in the entire group had even heard of Slashdot.
But you'd better believe they all frequented Amazon.
It just comes right down to daily life concerns for these people. They want to make the most money they can, spend it in the manner they choose, and they're not really about supporting causes unless it's an easy cause to support. You know the kind of people I mean: they recycle their trash, but they don't carpool.
Software licensing is the same way. Sure, it's easy to say you support open source when you're downloading somebody else's work, but when it comes to your paycheck, that's a much harder concession to make. If I wanted to hunt around for an open source employer in this market, I'd be hunting for quite a while. Instead, we all contribute to each other's programs out of a community experience. We all learn from each other, we all profit from the other's knowledge, and better products come out of it.
What's your damage, Heather?
Yes, in the ideal world we can all use open source software and contribute to it. But right now there are several large systems that I have to use daily which are closed source. And they have bugs, and other really annoying bits of user interface that might as well be bugs. I'd love to spend a few hours and fix those problems, because I'd end up saving time in the long run. So there is personal gain to be had (i.e., motivation to contribute), just like in the open source model, even though an outside company would be profiting from my work. I doubt I'd want to contribute major amounts of time to a "gated community" project though - the time would be better spent on an open source alternative.
For corporate developers these models are more attractive than closed-source development models. Basically it means "you can fix the bugs and hope that the fix will be included in the next release". This is much better than the "if there is a bug and you pay enough money or are very lucky, it might be fixed in the next release" model of traditional closed-sourced software. Of course, OpenSource software is still better, but there isnt open-sourced software for everything, and it is much easier to convince the management to buy software from a big vendor than to use OSS and rely on a small company for support or do not have any professional support at all.
gated supports a wider variety of protocols that routed including ospf! But isn't there already an open source implementation?
Sure the software companies like it, but what do the developers get out of it?
They get a paid. A large proportion of people are less concerned about causes than they are about funding their lifestyle. Perhaps if they are faced with an equal choice between gated and non-gated development, they may choose the former.
There is a lot of closed source out there, and for many commercial reasons it is probably not practical or worthwhile to go open-source. Also, given the state of some commercial software that I have seen, customers would probably start losing sleep if they saw the quality/state of the software that runs inside of their products.
Open source software is great, but there are many other causes, and many other interesting things and much more to life.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
Okay, it's not Open Source, but at least you access to the source code and can fix bugs when neccessary.
The number of time I've wished i could do that I can't count!
Infact, Borland has always done something like this with their VCL for Delphi. You can't redistibute the source, but they ship it, and it's great for seeing how they do thing, or fixing (fairly infrequent in Delphi) bugs.
You know, the really big companies that provide not only a job to employees, but housing, shopping/entertainment facilities, etc., where the company is essentially an entirely self contained city. The company isn't just a career, it's your life. Some Japanese companies are like this. Not sure if the idea would catch on elsewhere. About the only US equivalent are mining companies, which provide as I've described out of necessity since the mines are often extremely isolated from even civilization.
I support a helpdesk product (Tivoli Service Desk, formerly known as Expert Advisor) that gets shipped to customers with source code for the application written in a proprietary language, along with the tools needed to rebuild the application from the source.
What the customers get from this is the ability to do bug-fixes themselves, if necissary, as well customizing the application for their individual needs.
Unlike a traditional open-source project, the company still retains the copyright, but customers can do what they please with their own copy of the code. This makes the application much more useful and powerful to many of our customers.
I'm not saying that an open-source model wouldn't be more valuable, but an open-source closed-license model can have its uses as well.
Why is it a problem for some (all) of you that some people have different ideals than us /.ers? hell, most of our discussions are ONLY about differences in ideals. Does anyone remember that Dilbert Toon where Phil offers Dilbet either eternal fame and poverty, or great wealth and obscurity? These people decided that they didn't want to work with OSS and tat thoes ideals just aren't for them. They might be idiots, but that's not our problem.
The only reason this MIGHT be a problem is that some of you might have a lot invested in OSS and are woried about competition, what are you? Learning a bit from Bill Gate$? Competition is GOOD! It will keep all the second-rate OSS from being it's final stage - "good enough, nothing better out there, I can stop working on it now for a year or so." If the OSS triunphs, Great! If the "gatted communities" and "big corp" SW comes out on top, than thoes who program the OSS haven't worked on it hard enough, and their stuff SHOULDN'T be prefered - we DO live in something of an open market, thoes of us in NA and EU anyways.
Everything and everyone is an aspect of Gd. So remember to show proper respect!
I work for an organization that has a software product that comes with source for customers, so I guess we count as a "gated community project". However, I would say that at least for us, we do not view this as some variation of an open source project. We view it as a way to deliver extra value to our customers.
As a bit more background, there are plenty of open source projects in our area, but none have the power of the commercial offerings. The other major commercial offerings do not offer source. And we pretty much have to keep this software "gated"; the revenue it brings in is probably mostly for support, but we'd loose a fair amount from people who only buy it and don't continue support. (There's also the minor detail that the current code base is awful, and is being rewritten from scratch.)
Who works for gated community projects, and why?
Currently, outside our organization, only two of our customers, although one or two more use it to help track down bugs. I'm pretty sure this has a lot more to do with the poor code base than the business model....
If it's just for the "bounty" isn't this just programmers working as contractors?
In this case, it's because the benefits directly help their organizations. One customer has shared their work with us --- improving the port on a less popular platform --- which has helped all who use that platform. The other is fixing up esoteric features that were broken in the most recent release (before my time); if we weren't abandoning the current code base we'd use his changes as well.
Surely for there to be any special open source goodness, these projects must attract collaboration over and above that which is payed for. But are they?
Absolutely to the former --- for one thing, we only pay in gratitude and recognition.... For the latter, not much now, we'll see after we produce a code base that doesn't require a master to safely do even minor changes.
And why should I contribute to a gated community rather than a true open source one?
A good question. In this case, because there is no open source project that can do the job. All the open source projects are done by part-timers, are generally at alpha level (although many are quite reliable), and all but one are fatally flawed in one way or another. The only one that isn't fatally flawed has a long way to go, and has a nice extension system but doesn't incorporate scripting.
(This is a domain where some of the code should be in Perl or the like for flexibility, and some needs to be in C/C++ or the like for efficiency. No one is really doing both, and our closed source competitors have fortunately (for us) made a grave architectural mistake, as some of our former customers have discovered to their dismay.)
We offer support (which is critical to some --- you wouldn't believe the number of calls we get in August, when the only sysadmin who knows our software is on vacation), and have two people working nearly full time on development (webmaster, sysadmin, and escalated support duties take a little time away from development), and have a simple pricing model. And the cost of our software is pretty small in the scheme of things for most of our customers. All in all we occupy a nice niche for a subset of the market.
My guess is it won't work, not that it can't, but it simply won't.
Look at Netscape and Mozilla. Here's a project that has the potential to benefit everyone. Furthermore, it has the potential to draw attention and support from anyone in the Linux software development community. It's almost a captive audience. What other integrated browser, mail, and news tool works as well under Linux? The reality is Netscape is the proverbial only game in town.
Now look at the reality of Mozilla.
"Code Rush" (Public Broadcasting System special on Netscape and Mozilla) certainly shows a glimpse into the effort these people are expending on Mozilla. It is hard work, and I have considerable respect for these people. Ultimately however, they've yet to deliver. There's something here that's not working. Is it statistical, where the model is good but it isn't going to work all of the time? Is it a bad model that cannot work?
For a "gated community", a company would need to establish an infrastructure similar to Mozilla.org, at least as regards function. Make the code available out of house, and integrate changes from outside contributors. That costs money. It requires equipment, comm, and staff. If a "gated community" project is to have a chance to succeed, the infrastructure better work.
So, a "gated community" project is established, announced, and initialized. Who is going to contribute? What's the incentive? Mozilla has some degree of incentive. Netscape is respecting me as a potential contributor by giving me certain corresponding rights. Why would I contribute to Acme Software's Foo project if in return they give nothing? My guess is there will be little return on investment on these projects, and will therefore be unattractive to the software companies.
I believe that the "gated community" model is destined for /dev/null.
Graham
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
Barnum explained why people would work for free, not even getting the benefit of being able to use the product of their labor for themselves.
/* after the sucker is born,
int main () {
struct sucker {
int dummy;
} *s;
while (1) {
s = malloc (sizeof sucker);
we leave it to fend for itself.
*/
sleep (60);
}
return 0;
}
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
It's not an ideological thing either. It's simply bad business.
First, I really don't like the misconception here that all Open-Source software has to be free-beer as well as free-speech. That's a really big problem for this community, namely that we're seen that way. I suppose it's understandable, since pretty much all Open-Source software to date has been free-beer, but that doesn't make it right.
What's my point here? With true Open-Source development, the developer does get compensated. Not necessarily in terms of money, to be sure, but there is the fame aspect, or even just the right to use one's own code as one wishes. And other rewards stem from this too, of course, but I can't list them all here. Consider, for example, Linus Torvalds. I seriously doubt he even needs a resume anymore; all he has to do is say "I wrote Linux" and he could likely just walk into any computer job he wished (well, maybe not at Microsoft, and there are formalities that need to be taken care of, but he could certainly at least get an offer anywhere else).
Perhaps I misread the article, but it seems that a "gated community" developer gets nothing at all. No money. No right to use the software (since it looks like you have to have already purchased it before you can develop, so that right is not a benefit of coding). And the company takes all the credit. Who would want to work in a model like that? It takes the OSS and proprietary models and it mixes the worst of both.
Of course, I could have been misreading the article about the compensation bit. But the fact remains, I see a lot of people here who say this is better than not being paid for OSS. Who says you can't get paid for OSS? You can make some serious money off of software, and in the end the business model you use won't make that much difference. I wonder which piece of software will prove that once and for all. Perhaps Mozilla/Netscape, once it's released, can make its way to obtaining this. Or maybe it will be Darwin; granted it's currently only the core of OSX that is Open-Source, but if the core succeeds there's no reason to believe that more of the OS couldn't possibly follow. Or maybe it will be something else. I don't know. All I know it's only a matter of time before someone hits it. And once that happens, maybe people will finally really see the advantages of the model, unhampered by the myth that you can't make money with it.
The advantages are that the user gets to use and tweak the code. (Don't some people want access to window's source code?? to make things run better?)
Now in return, the software company should either condisder the OSDeveloper as an employee, payting for the hours spent on it, or my favorite, the company should give them a lifeime subscription to use of the software and derivities (sp?) that the company or other OSD develops
This is really nothing more than some company saying that they can apply the "open source" development model to a variety of software projects. The Open Source community is just one such "gated community" where you share your source with everyone or you can't be part of the community. No matter how you look at it, that's a gate.
The point here is not that some licensing model is better than another, it is that a particular development model is better than another. The open source developement model is radical because it flattens heirarchies and is an anathema to bureaucracy. People will do well to adopt it as their development process, even if the software produced is a closed product. The lesson learned is that open communication channels and peer equality produces better software.
Gated open source (lower-case, not branded) software will allow the development model to enter a corporate world in desperate need of some hierarchy flattening. Even small, traditional companies can't get over the failed "you can't do that you're a peon" mentality. How often have you seen technology decisions made behind closed doors by people who are hire on the food chain but don't have a clue about the technology? This is something the open source development model is designed to prevent. If you can do it, prove it. Discuss all ideas openly and select the best one.
After this develpment model is adopted, it will natural lead to more openness. People have to understand what having a voice means before they can understand that everybody should have one.
The license issue is a distribution model and should be discussed seperately from the development model. Closed source software developed using the open source development model will eventually suffer if the wrong distribution model is being used, but we shouldn't discourage the spirit of this model from being adopted just because we are a few years ahead of our peers.
Yes, you're absolutely right. How shameful I feel! And I keep justifying my use of fuel oil to heat my house even! Who are we to live in these heated houses and apartment buildings? It ruins the natural order. I say, leave all building materials in their natural state! Do the right thing! Sure, some of us will freeze to death, but that'll reduce our burden on Mother Earth. Take my blanket brother! We'll all live in one big tent, imagine the energy we'll save. For the future! For the children!
What amazes you? Reality? That there are people who work 30-60 miles from home? That there may be people who don't like their co-workers? That some people smoke in their cars? (You'll love my cigars. Really.) The limited amount of time in any given day? People with kids and disparate schedules? What aspect of all that are you having a problem with?
There are a lot of ways to save energy "for the future". Solar doesn't work where I am; windmills could help. But when I have to drive to see a client, I'm not taking a freaking party with me.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
If you use a piece of software hard enough you will find a bug of some kind. Reporting that to some authority to get it fixed doesn't change for the true end user (who has nothing to contribute to the source.) Applying 'Open source' to a project does not make it magically bug-free. The user still has to debug whatever they run. (If you write it, the ignorant user will come break it!)
I mean the user tells whoever the author was that, "I wasn't there. The computer just suddenly gave this message. I wasn't near the keyboard and I wasn't doing anything. Now Fix It! I have to get some work done and this/you are holding me up!" And this same user can't even tell you what is clearly appearing in a message box on the screen.
These things happen whether you use Linux, UNIX, Windows, Apples whatever.
The only thing the user cares about is that it doesn't happen again. They don't care about Open vs. Proprietary. They still have to call some one and be all embarrassed about 'breaking' the computer. They just don't want it to keep happening. (Even if they do lie about being there when it happened.)
So it all boils down to who can read the user the best and respond most quickly to their wishes and desires. Because the true end user is really, really stupid and unable to communicate effectively about their computer.
Never underestimate the power of stupidity.
I have friends who have been told directly not to download the source to Sun's stuff to avoid their license restrictions.
Think about that for a bit.
I don't care about the copyright restrictions as long as someone isn't doing something outrageous, unfortunately companies seem to feel obliged to do something outrageouse so I pretty much have to care about them. (And yes, I do contribute bug fixes back when something bothers me. I even contributed one back to slashdot.) Therefore I will avoid gated communities on principle. Even if said company is actually fairly reasonable about it, it isn't worth my time to find that out...
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
My interest is what I can learn from a gated community. Obviously, int. property restrictions preclude me from copying the material (and in some cases the ideas). But there's still a lot that I can learn from looking at "good" code.
Subtle ideas to optimize the speed.
Simple ways to clarify the interface.
Slick methods to increase the functionality.
I'm not a student in school anymore and I don't have Professors and TA's looking at my work to tell me that something is sufficient or providing ideas and methods for me to learn how to improve my work.
Community source code projects allow me to watch the development of a project that I'm interested in. A project driven by commercial intersts has the added benefit that there is a paid QA staff and a paying clientele that provides much swifter and uncomprimising evaluation of the worth of the patches and "improvements".
Non-commercial open source is good as well if it's driven and controlled by people whose opinions I respect, but altruism is a less compelling quality motivator than greed.
My main interests in projects is foremost my education, but if I am interested in the project and as a user I find bugs or limitations I will contribute whatever I can (be it code or a bug report or whatever).
I'm probably not the ideal contributor to any community source project (whether gated or open), but my interest is in improving my code and my continuing education. Not profit. Not intellectual property.
That's my (limited) perspective anyway.
I once saw a bicycle path that had a gate across it. The owner of a house adjacent to the park had to close the gate once a year to assert his right to back his car out over the driveway.
I think this approach would work for closed-source community: close your source once a year to assert your rights--shut down your website on New Year's Eve--and leave it open the rest of the time.
Keep all your dinosaurs in gated communities. This allows them to extinct themselves faster.
--
+&x
Ok, so unwillingness to car pool == moral equivalence to going along with the Holocaust? Because you think using gas dooms the world? Can you say "lack of perspective"? Do you know any real people juggling schedules to take care of their kids and businesses? And if not, why not?
Electric utilities are one of the biggest users of carbon fuels and polluters - you gonna turn your computers off?
I didn't think so. In fact, all the traditional toys of "geeks", all the electronics and plastics those evil corporate bastards make for us are about the worst thing we as humans could be producing in terms of their environmental impact. Gonna throw away your MP3 player, stereo, cell phone? And if you did, guess what - no matter how much recycling you do, they're not exactly biodegradable.
What pushed my button was the constant moralizing of technology and rampant stereotyping of anyone not living for Linux.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
The original poster asks: This report in Upside Today suggests that big software companies are attracted by the "gated community" model - unsurprisingly as it seems to be classic "help us debug our software and we'll keep the copyright, thanks". Upside (in my opinion, naively) presumes that because this idea is attractive to software companies, who will invest in it, it's obviously going to take off. But is this likely? Who works for gated community projects, and why?
Right to the top of my head people that work for gated community projects are a.) the Blackdown folk who are porting Java to Linux, b.) the people who contribute to Mozilla which will have proprietary extensions added to it as AOL's default browser and c.) anyone who has ever released code under the BSD license (which can be seen as gated community development since the code can be closed by third parties). Your questions seems to smack of someone who equates open source with the GPL. Remember ESR's Cathedra l and the Bazaar, many developers write open source code to scratch an itch and note necessarily to further the ideal of Free Software. After all this is why the Blackdown developers work on Java, they like the language and want a port for it on Linux, and whoever copyrights the software is not a concern as long as they get a quality port of Java to Linux. Frankly, I would place myself as someone who'd work on a gated community program, simply because I'd contribute patches to proprietary code and not care if the became GPL afterwards or not. E.g. I use Visual Studio (as well as Emacs) to develop code, sometimes Intellisense (the drop down box and tooltips that show function arguments, comments and class members while editing code) sometimes freezes up on me and goes away. If I somehow get at the code and patch this I would, and frankly I wouldn't feel that a requirement for my patch to be accepted be that MSFT GPL a few million lines of code that took them years to develop. Also if I did this my itch would be scratched.
The original poster also asked: If it's just for the "bounty" isn't this just programmers working as contractors? Surely for there to be any special open source goodness, these projects must attract collaboration over and above that which is payed for. But are they? And why should I contribute to a gated community rather than a true open source one?
Hmmmm, exactly what does special Open Source goodness mean? I doubt that everyone who has ever contributed a patch or reported a bug has done this out of an altruistic pursuit of goodness. Frankly, software is simply a tool to get a job done and for most software developers that's as far as it goes. So if one had a choice between improving an established product that one uses so as to make it better and getting paid to do it or creating a competing product in one's free time while working at a reqular job...which would the average software developer choose?
Java is a pretty good language, and Sun's implementation of it is reasonably nice. I think it's good if people use Java more, even on open source projects. Truly free implementations of it are becoming available.
But the only people who might want to download source code to Sun's Java implementation are people who work on implementation-related issues, and those are just the kind of people who we need to fix bugs in Kaffe or the other open source VMs. If they become "contaminated", that's bad. Besides, there isn't much point looking at Sun's Java source code--Sun is very unlikely to incorporate any bugfix you come up with, even if it fixes a long-standing bug. They are simply too busy.
I think that when the smoke clears, it will turn out that Apple had the best sense of what open source will and won't do.
Their situation: they want OS X to run on x86, but don't want to make the investment to support it. The solution: open source the low and middle level bits of the OS. The NeXT community gets a free x86 version of NextStep and works on it because it gives them control of the OS they really want. Meanwhile, Apple gets x86 porting done for them making it relatively easy to drop Carbon/Cocoa/Quartz on top should they ever decide to do so.
The key here is that Apple is willing to relinquish control of what they're not interested in doing themselves, while also realizing what they need to hold onto.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Still, for an essential piece of software, if there are no alternatives, this is better than nothing. People will contribute bug fixes for problems that absolutely need to get fixed now. If the license is reasonable (no "contamination"), it will speed up the development of compatible libraries. And if programmers get paid for work on such a project, it also seems preferable to working on a project that is completely closed source.
In general, the average gated community software has more focus and is of higher quality. Yes, there are high profile exceptions (the Linux kernel, Apache, sendmail). It isn't hard to see why this is true. Apple or Bell Labs, for example, have have teams of screened, experienced people working on projects day in and day out for years. The average Open Source project tends to be a loose group of people of varying experience, with a sizable percentage of those people being idealistic students without much knowledge of software engineering.
Yes, you can say "Microsoft puts out crap," and maybe that's true, but CorelDraw and Photoshop and Delphi and Allegro Common Lisp and QNX are all excellent products. So you can't slam all "for pay" software developers. Hooking up with such a group makes sense, because it results in better software for everyone. A group of renegade college students trying to clone Excel or Word is more doomed to fail, and not the best use of one's time.
The success of free/open-source software is not dependent on its large-scale (or even small-scale) adoption by the commercial sector. The community is a totally independent organism with its own positive-feedback growth mechanisms, and at its most commercially-affected, all it does is take specifications from the commercial sector as additional input, occasionally. It certainly doesn't need to do so to survive and grow.
ESR was right to say that the commercial world would do well to adopt open-source practice, but that doesn't mean that there is a reciprocal dependency. In many respects, commercial interest just creates inertia which limits the natural growth potential of free software, in part for no other reason than that it tends to create big products which are then not easily built upon by the rest of the community. It's the pure RMSian meaning of "success" that gives the community its massive potential, a continuous cycle of enhance-or-reuse and redistribute without limit, and the commercial world is simply not a part of it unless they drop the strings that they would otherwise attach to everything they release.
The short answer to the article then is, it doesn't really matter as far as the success of free/open-source software is concerned. The only really relevant aspect to it is that greater awareness of these issues results in more money being available for community-aware developers in general, which for the most part is probably good.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The original post confuses two concepts: sponsored communitie and gated communities. Some open source projects now have corporate sponsors, but they are truly open source. The Upside article mentioned HP and Sun.
These are sponsored communities. The "gated communities" are not for average open source contributors to visit at all. They are for corporations to use to develop their own software with their own employees and their corporate partners. The cool thing is that they are using open source development methods within the gates. That means that more people are learning about open source and will be ready to contribute to the public projects.
A friend of mine worked an an ISP for a while which was actually run from a gated community. The owner bought two adjacent townhouses and cut a hole between their basements, and set up an ISP in their combined basement. I have a feeling that the homeowners association would not have liked it too much if they found out...
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
Anyway, I use software from a number of companies where I or my company actually paid for the source code. One of them sent me a letter one day: they were horrified that I actually paid for my personal license when I sent in usable bug fixes at a regular basis.
I don't care that I'm helping a company for free. I just want the bug fixed, and having the source allows me to do that much quicker than to depend on their engineers to fix them. But it's mighty nice to get a reaction like this!
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
This is so true... It's going to be very interesting to see where Open Source ends up from the end user perspective.
There is a lot to be said for the Red Hat model: have users pay a small sum for the software, offer limited support, and make the software available for free to the relatively small amount of people who can provide fixes on their own.
I'm personally sick and tired of folks using Open Software because it's cheap, and offloading support to the mailing lists without bothering to read up on the FAQ's. But to me it's a small price to pay for direct access to the developers, who I can address in their own language (C :-)
Anyway, while I agree with all your points, I'd like to add one: the alternative to Open Source and its attitude to support. Ever reported a bug in Office to Microsoft?
When end-users report a bug to Microsoft, it gets ignored. When a small company (500 licenses) reports a bug, it gets ignored. When the CEO of a company the size of the Ford Motor Company reports his feelings to Microsoft, they listen. Unfortunately, the number one wish (fix the more egrecious bugs) tend to get a lower priority than the new feature requests.
Oh well, this is not to bash Microsoft. Most software companies work this way. It's just that Microsoft is a really bad and really visible example. Microsoft does have the moral equivalent of "STABLE" releases of Office. They just don't tell anyone. I work for a big corporation, we get all the good stuff from Microsoft, but finding out what's a bugfix release on the gigabytes of stuff on CD's and what it fixes is like pulling teeth.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
Actually I've been thinking this would be a good way for opensource companies to support opensource programmers. Offer anybody that contributes on a somewhat regular basis to any project that interests that company and they'll give you a free place to live (with free net connection of course). In Miami they have some great gated communites and it'd be awesome to be able to go hang out at the pool with other developers and their families. If I didn't have to pay rent it'd be a lot easier to donate my time and being around my codevelopers in real space would make it easier to plan certain things. I've even priced such communites that were up for sell and the price isn't anywhere as high as you'd think. I'm ready to live in my RedHat community now. Reminds you sort of like Snow Crash & The Diamond Age eh?
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Speaking of rl gated communities, I wonder why they coined the phrase for their software development model...I mean, am I the only one who thinks "gated communities" has an extremely negative connotation?
Ok, here's my theory on the Gate Philosophy: It keeps the users out, clear and simple. In any OSS model the user is invited to look at the source and actually become smarter. In the Closed model, there is a CLEAR distinction between programmer and end user; the programmer is smart, and the end user is the one who is stupid and we have to dumb this down for him. That boundary is not as prevelant in the OSS model...
So which is it? Would you rather support a model that tells you that you're dumb and that you should be spoon-fed your software, or the one that actually shows you how the spoon works, so you can use it yourself?
Hammer of Truth
So, how would this fit in with the concepts of Gated Communities? I don't actually see much problem with letting people have the source: keeping it locked up does nothing to prevent piracy. Most companies I know are fairly careful about licensing the software they use, and organisations exist to police this.
The big problem with working on non-OSS software, such as Sun stuff, is that someone else gets to keep all the profits. This sucks. But if you get either an up-front payment or a share in the profits from the software you are working on, then would that make more sense? How would it be if, say, Sun started paying $10 per accepted bugfix (where "accepted" means "integrated into their codebase"), and unless you sell your patch or whatever to the company you get to keep the rights to it? Would people here find that kind of model acceptable? Would you be attracted to projects run this way? I'm interested in opinions.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I think people seem to be missing the point. "Gated-community" is just market FUD. Of COURSE when a company buys software they'll want the source code. Because most of the time the code is buggy, and the buyer doesn't have time to let the seller figure that out - they're gonna fix it themselves. And once they do that, they're gonna tell the seller about the bug, and about the fix. Because when the next 'patch' of the product is shipped, the buyer will want that bug fixed. Really it boils down to free configuration management of the software that's been bought, plus the extra day or week that's gained by fixing it yourself. And in most cases, that makes it worth the labour.
Loki gathered some hackers (including ESR) to hack (under NDA) tricks for their game "Civilization: Call to Power".
It was reported earlier.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Actually, the amount of knowledge and experience that Open Source developers get when writing software is equivalent to at least 1-2 full year classes on writing software. Plus, they can do it on their own, and will find it easier to distribute. For example, when you go to interview for a job, it's very nice to be able to say, "Oh yeah, I wrote Gaim (a gnome AIM app)." or "I actually worked on the kernel development for Mandrake Linux." /. is all about.
But, I guess that it's just my opinion, but then again, that's what