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?

Comments

It's all about the Benjamins

[Brento]

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.