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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?
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
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.
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.