Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
In fact, I am a Grown Up in my thirties who knows LOTS of people who juggle careers and family (and non-profit commitments and hobbies and more.) I even know single-parent families with incomes of less than $25000 a year who do the same - and show more conscientiousness about their effects on the world than either you or I. (Since my family is from Latin America, I probably have points of references that you can't even imagine, if you really want to play the You Don't Know So You Can't Say game.) I'm not that judgemental of those who don't do all they can: I just note that they aren't doing all they can. There's a differencing between moralizing and observing, and when the latter is demonized as the former, God help us all.
And as I understand it, the issue isn't "Linux," but specific models for software development, some of which are based on a model of closed development that we at least nominally consider sub-optimal.
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
That is not *yet* the case, although the health consequences of the massive pollution in Mexico City have yet to be quantified. What is the case is that no one *intends* to cause this damage, they are just taking care of families and trying to get by.
Your huffy self-justification is just like that of every individual who would be responsible for such destruction, just like the Good German who only voted for the Nazi's because they improved the economy and reduced crime, and turned a blind eye to the consequences. You are actually worse than Joe Everyman, because you would pursue the behaviour out of defensive spite.
I'm not interested in a 'purity test' or contest for sainthood. No one wins those. I just would rather good things happened than bad. You've inherited some sort of perverse damnation-theory, whereby any sort of criticism of a behaviour is tantamount to being damned to being not-a-good-person. Sorry about that, but there's a real world with shades of grey, in which harm is caused inadvertently. My point about the good old Third Reich is that the Germans who supported the system were not essentially different that the rest of us. They weren't even Nazi's - they were just minding their own business.
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.
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.
I did not make not-carpooling equivalent with "the Nazis." No where. I will tell you what I did say, you semi-illiterate boob:
I said there is a similarity in kind between normal people causing harm in two different situations, one of which happens to be one of the worst episodes blah blah.
Look, no one does everything they could, but you seem to take it as some kind of personal affront to anyone refusing to canonizing your contentious ass.
I'm not even a dye-in-the-wool environmentalist, it was just an issue to prove a point (as was the original poster's) about the everyday compromises that people make. And that is the point: especially as we get older, we make compromises. Which is OK and normal as our lives grow more complex, but we should still be made aware that they are compromises, and they have consequences.
By the way, I can keep this going as long as you can, until you slip into complete irrationality.
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.
Loki gathered some hackers (including ESR) to hack (under NDA) tricks for their game "Civilization: Call to Power".
It was reported earlier.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu