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Open Source - Why Do We Do It?
mikosullivan presents us with a unique opportuinity: "This Saturday, Sep 8, I have an appointment to meet with Congressman Rick Boucher to discuss open-source software. I made the appointment after talking to the congressman at a town-meeting here in Blacksburg, VA. During our short talk he asked a question that (not being a particularly talented public speaker) I found difficult to answer: why do open source software developers devote their time and talents to something they give away? That's the question I'd particularly like to answer: why do we do it? Answering this question may be the key to resolving public FUD about open source. This meeting is part of the
opensourcelobby.org efforts."
Many of us started writing software that we wanted or needed to use individually, but soon found that it felt better to give it to friends who could use it and improve it as well. It's kind of like an ego trip without having people acknowledging your ego, hence not becoming known as arrogant or egocentric (not that that still doesn't happen). YOU know that other people depend on you, and YOUR work is appreciated.
If others improve on your work, you still made it possible for the improvement to happen. If you improved someone elses work, you still feel ownership of making it better. In short, it makes us feel good.
-- Len
Well, of all the code I've written I've made 3 semi-available. 1 I did as an assignment for work, which was then semi-released as part of a toolkit. The other two were things that did not exist, and I wished to due largely because I wanted to learn something each program required (socket code and libGMP respectively).
After they were finished, and cleaned, I figured that since they didn't exist before, someone might be interested in them if for no other reason than 'it has been done'.
... well, I suppose they're related reasons really. But anyway.
First reason: suppose I have a problem with a computer, which needs code written to solve it. Once I've written the code and solved my problem, it seems a little unfair to make everybody else have to write their own solution when there's already one here. So I give the solution freely to friends who ask for it - and it's only a small step from there to putting it on a website for everybody.
Second reason, which I suppose is implicit in the first: I get a kick out of feeling I've benefitted everybody. Not just those people who pay for my code, to the feeble extent the licence agreement permits them to benefit; but anyone with a web browser who wants to download useful stuff off me. By contrast, when I work at my day job I'm always conscious that I'm primarily working to benefit them, and that any benefit that comes to people outside the company is a necessary side effect and not the actual goal.
(Yes, I know I'm not benefitting absolutely everybody, because there are people who don't have computers, or don't want to do the same things as me with their computers, who have no need for the stuff I write. Doesn't bother me; what I like is the idea that anyone who wants my stuff can get it. It's not necessary for everyone in the world to want it. People who don't want it don't have to have it, and hey, that's cool too :-)
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Ego.
People write free software for the same reason they want nice cars and big houses - so people will notice and envy them. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's no big mystery.
Quite simply, people write software of the highest quality they're capable of, then give it away, in the hopes that it will become popular, and they'll become a household name (even if only among geeks). People want to be able to go into an IRC channel, or make a Usenet post, and say something like "Oh yeah? You're saying I don't know anything about software? Well, you know vi? I wrote that."
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
"Because it's there." Or, the geek version of it, perhaps, "Because we can."
Which is obviously no different from the views of commercial developers. The turning point isn't why such energy is put into it, it's why you give it away. And that should be self evident: in an increasingly, hideously commercialized society, developers are forced every day to work with things that don't work right, cost exorbitant amounts of money, and make you forego many of what should otherwise be your usage rights at the behest of whoever's selling said thing. Why give it away? To counterbalance the lunacy of current sales policy. Why put so much effort in? No-one likes working with junk.
AHHHHHHH! I'm burning with goodness again!
- Reakk, Sluggy Freelance
Computers, cars, it doesent matter. We want to know what goes on under the hood. We have the feeling that we can 'soup it up' make it better than the person who origionally came up with the idea. And more often than not, it is so.
We do it for the challenge.
We do it for the sense of community.
We do it because we are altruistic.
These are definatly not motivating factors in the business world.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
Why does one friend of mine spend a couple hours a week visiting a couple prison? He specificlly is visiting prisoners in for life without parole, they didn't know each other before hand, and they are not relatives.
Why did one guy I work with spend one of his weeks of vacation in Mexico with habbitat for humanity building houses in Mexica? He doesn't speak spanish, has no mexican roots, Mexico is 1000 miles away, and he went in summer, not winter when you would want to leave home.
Why does my dad run the 4-h food stand at the fair, and then take the money he is paid for that and donate it back to 4-h?
Open source by comparition is easy, I need a program, and by going open source I get others to help me with it, making it better. Its not about non-programers using it (note that bug reports are useful and put you as part of the process), it is about programers doing something that alone they would take longer to do. Unfortunatly this obvous answer is wrong, open source has the same reasons at the root as the others.
I'm not trying to be defensively obnoxious here (heck, I'm not defending anything!), but I don't really understand why the Congressman is interested in "why" of open source. Part of this stems from my take on American politics; that is, there should be no fixed constellation of political orthodoxy, but mainly, I'd like to know of what concern it is to Boucher.
If it comes up, could you ask him why he wants to know? I'm more curious than anything else, but it seems that "why" really shouldn't matter, just "that" people do, indeed, code to give the code away.
While this is only true for the balance of free software developers, perhaps it's the fact that people who are able at programming computers are generally not able at having 'a life', thus leaving them with lots of time to fill. Thus, free software.
it's there.
And it's addictive.
And it's how the world should work.
We lead by example.
I do it because of the internet. It was built by people much more knowledgable than M$'s and is being maintained by those same people. M$ wants to take that over and control it, all the way down to the packet level if they have their way. Those of us in a free country cannot allow that level of control over our lives.
I think ERS has kinda hit the nail on the head in this one. We do it because it makes us feel proud of ourself. When we write or contribute to a kicker of a project , and it ends up on a Redhat CD or something, and get an email to the effect of "Wow thanks for that little app, it saved my ass the other day at work". You know it's a good thing
:)
Humans are status seeking beings, where not unlike other critters in that being top dog is something we'd like. Maybe it's some sorta latent mate scoring thing. Maybe its post-animal displaying psychology, but either way putting out the most (excuse the silly s'kiddee phrase) leet app and geting kudo's for it makes us feel valid
We do it because we see ourself as being important in the comunity. And we like our communities, that's why we want to give our little pieces of (questionable) genius to it.
And maybe we might even score (hmmmm).
Perhaps a little MS-fear helps too. Valiantly ahead for linus* and country
*or RMS or ESR or your old CS professor or whoever get's your admiration.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I can't speak to open source directly, but there are other things that I do that I could do for money but don't. Because -- as astonishing as it may be to some people -- I have found that there are some things worth doing, for which money is inadequate compensation. (Or even, in some cases, would make it less worth doing.)
From the jargon file:
/fuhd/ n. Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon.
FUD
(my bold)
You said: "Answering this question may be the key to resolving public FUD about open source."
My question is, are you meaning MS-instilled FUD, or is there now a new definition of FUD, for mere FUD that has arisen on its own rather than via propaganda? Or are you just using it wrong? =P
OK, I'm done being a dictionary nazi for the day.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
Several years ago, I got so fed up with Windows that I decided to try to write myself an operating system. Very, very basic, not at all fancy, but something I'd have control of, and that I could fix problems with as they came up.
About that time, on a whim I picked up a book which had a Linux CD in the back. I installed it, played around a bit, and I've never looked back.
Now you can only imagine the complete lack of functionality my home brewed OS would have had relative to Linux. But with Linux, I have all this amazing functionality, and with all the control and ability to change things I would have with a home brewed system; the only caveat is that if I do make an improvement, I should contribute it back to the community. That is a small, small price to pay for what I'm receiving.
As well, how many people have the time to write a system like Linux on their own, even if they have the knowledge? Not many. But by being willing to contribute what time they do have to a larger effort, they get a far better system than they could ever hope to have otherwise. Practically speaking, it's a no brainer.
We "do" open source because it's a better development model - the end product is stronger (most of the time). Say what you will about infighting and the group politics that can be found in any setting: there's a reason more and more "mission-critical" applications run on open source platforms and technologies.
I like getting email almost every day from people thanking me that I saved them so many weeks worth of work and that they appreciate what I've done. I like the attention. I like the community.
why do open source software developers devote their time and talents to something they give away?
Often, it is because they need the software they are writing.
Often, it is because they are curious about a particular technology and "just playing".
Often, it is because of a principled decision to shun proprietary software.
Often, it is because a particular piece of software would fetch no money in a commercial market.
Often, it is to impress chicks.
I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
"We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer
This is why many programmers supplement their tasks and education with an output to the Opensource coummnity - it feels good!
Berto
Apart from a few evangalistic & talented individuals I think most Open Source projects are started by relatively young hackers who want to develop their coding skills and try and write an application they feel would better their lives or their workstation.
... I'm sure Source Forge is littered with thousands of "Version 0.001" releases that will never make it to the actually useful stage.
I spent months of my free time trying to hack together a personal organiser/scheduler that could cope with my busy life before I gave up, sold my Amiga, and moved to a more modern platform. I must have started 100 different "projects" that I would be ashamed ever to show anyone *grin*
In my old days as a developer I worked with a guy who contributed a significant account to XEmacs and he done it because he was a power-user who was talented enough to be able to code in Lisp, and he felt compelled to help as he relied on Emacs for coding commercial apps. People like this are few and far between, and few have the comittment and long-term motivation required to take development through to completion, unless they are working in a paid, competitive environment with real customers, deliverables, and deadlines.
The problem is that not enough people band together, start a (semi) formal development programme with solid requirements, and then code/test it to completion
People do lots of things for reasons other than money. A personal challenge, a project that isn't financially viable but is worthy and helpful, simple fame and glory.
All these things are fantastic for open source software, and in the main they keep the projects going. BUT.. they'll only keep the project going while the creative people have enthuiasm for the thing they're doing. If that motivation ever disappears then the project disappears with it.
This, in my opinion, is why the GPL is ultimately bad for free and open source software. The GPL forces software derived from other open projects to remain open. While this doesn't stop people making a decent living supporting and maintaining their work, it does stop the 'traditional' business model of selling your software. This elminates the source of motivation that keeps many projects going long after the original excitement has run out. In the long term, I feel this will stop many talented developers taking projects to their maximum. Truely free software is not restricted in any way. If people want to close the source and sell their work they ought to be allowed to.
Let the flaming begin..
http://twitter.com/onion2k
http://sourceforge.net/projects/gutenbrowser
I do it because I am a god-damned Birkenstock-wearing hippy-freak, intent on sharing open love, free books, and free education for all!
I do it because there's more important things in life than money! Ideology!
For the same reason why I give out my music recordings for free.
Screw Wall Street, man!
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
We do it because we actually USE it.
I am a firm believer that software is best written by the people who actually use it and need it to work for them.
(I also like the ability to fix problems myself instead of relying on others to get it done, or at least knowing that I can. A personality qwirk perhaps.)
VA Linux down to $1.15 from its previous low of $1.25 and getting closer to being delisted. RedHat down to $3.11 from its previous low of $3.41. Ouch!
Linux: Where do you want to cash your unemployment check today?
We relate that to an analysis of the hacker culture as a `gift culture' in which participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity away.
We are geeks. As youngsters, we were isolated from the popular people BY THEIR CHOICE. We sat alone at lunchtime, ignored. We played by ourselves on the playgrounds, we read books and found libraries, instead of all the cool things that popular people do. We took electronic things apart, rather than hang out with friends, since we had no friends. We are geeks.
Then one day, the whole world started looking at us, wondering what we would do next. Popularity is not why we are here. We are here to be kind to those folks who were mean to us. We do it because we want to be nicer to others than they were to us. We sat there and watched you popular people for all those years, thinking, gee, if only I had friends, I would be nice to EVERYONE.
Not just the ones who give us money.
We do it for love, clear and simple.
That's why.
-Water Paradox
information is immaterial
I don't do open-source dev work, but I have done stuff for free in the past (websites, pc support). Why? Personally, I'll do stuff for free simply because I enjoy doing it. It's more of a hobby than a job, and I don't expect, nor have a need, to get paid for it.
For some people (a lot?), just the sense of accomplishment and pat on the back is payment enough. And sometimes it's worth more than money just to know that somebody has a use for, and possibly enjoys using, the product you provided them at no cost.
I make enough at my day job to pay the bills, buy neat stuff, etc., so it's not imperative I get paid for every little thing I do in my freetime. Sometimes I just need to enjoy it.
--mh
--mh
I think it is hard to find talented people on the job. But, in the open source world there are many.
Don't take this the wrong way. It is just that employers measure success differently. Is it on-time, on-budget, and does it work? They are not equiped to measure the quality of the design/code. So they never succesfully build a great team of people. You are always carrying some of them.
That means the only place you can both do a good job and work with good people is in the open world. Because, the people who choose to do development in their spare time are usually the talented ones.
The first sentence is perfect. I think the rest needs to be reworded for the congressman: "Many people are not satisfied with the quality and features of software provided by corporations. Many open-source developers see the free market as not fostering the best-of-the-best in the software industry. Most are also disatsfied with the monopoly which is providing most of our software options. These feelings motivate them to make high-quality, useful software."
Developers: We can use your help.
In all the cases I've seen, and in my own case, the answer is that we have *some* interest in the outcome of our effort. Be it that we want to write a piece of code 'better' than we've seen it written. Be it that we simply have it in our heads to do a certain thing.
However, you state it, it's important to note that we write code because we want to see the outcome of writing that code. We write open source code because cooperation is often preferable to competition.
As to not getting much/any monitary remuneration from our work in this area, when's the last time you got paid to do yardwork around your own house? Did you ever get tipped for washing/waxing/detailing your own car? Most likely not, but you got something out of the activity, yes?
If you'd just insert another column in those spreadsheets you use to track revenue. Ok, now label the column "Satisfaction"....
Happier?
Open Source developers do it for the same reason ALL volunteers do it: because they see a need that they are passionate about filling.
I recently volunteered to help out at my local elementary school's computer lab (first meeting is next week). Ask Senator Boucher if I'm crazy communist or a valuable citizen. Now tell him that I wrote and GPL'd an app that literally dozens of people have thanked me for (some calling it a "godsend"). Then ask him again if I'm crazy...
324006
I love my job but it's a job: it's got deadlines, weird requirements, the usual constraints. When I work on Open Source software I find myself more of a craftman. I think artist would be a tad strong, but craftman is definitely appropriate. I have complete freedom in the requirements. I can take my time, release only when I think it's ready, try alternate solutions and only keep the best one. In short I am proud of what I create.
The added bonus is when people then email me saying that they really use my tool, and then they show me the cool stuff they built with it, which I could never have written myself.
Writing Open Source Software makes me feel like coding is a noble trade and not just a race against the clock to output the crappiest software that will pass the acceptance test.
Look, that's why there's rules, understand? So that you think before you break 'em. (Terry Pratchett)
Or is the Martian-keesh an imposter???
/______|______\
o o
/ \
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\ ______/
/ \
| [@][@] | __________________
| ^^ |_/ \
| VVVVVV <_ I LOVE YOU ALL. |
\_______/ \ HONEST... /
* | | \________________/
/ ___/ \____
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LAMENESS FILTER
This Martian is Copyright © 2001 keesh. You may redistribute it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or later.
I wouldn't say we were cheap bastards.. More like resourceful.
It's a great way to market yourself and looks impressive on a resume. :-)
It's a great way to learn design and programming.
And it's definately egoenhancing
over "Market ME" features.
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess? - Joshua (Wargames)
There are a lot of reasons why someone might help code an Open Source project for free (remembering that some lucky bums get paid for this, too).
Some people do it to prove what they're capable of, whether just for the geek point or possibly in the hopes that a great employer will see what they've done and hire them to do something similar.
Some people just enjoy sharing, and others just enjoy creation. Maybe in the beginning the programmer didn't even think the end result would be worth paying for.
I think one of the original reasons, though, was that it's a way for you to potentially get the help from other people to finish a project. Say you're a programmer and you really wish there was a Swahili word processor out there. So you start making one yourself, but your objective isn't to make money--you'd be willing to pay for the program if it existed.
So instead, you put a bunch of work into it, and distribute the source, hoping that there are other programmers who also wish there were a good Swahili word processor available (maybe there is, this is just a lame example). So instead of spending $100 on the program, you spend a whole bunch of your time doing something you enjoy anyway, and sharing the work with other people who like doing this stuff.
If you enjoy programming and the feeling of creating something useful, then it's almost a negative cost--you're deriving enjoyment from creating it, instead of paying money for the right to use it.
In that case, asking why someone would participate in an Open Source project is much like asking why someone would choose to play chess or rugby.
byroniverse
1. I'm cheap
2. I'm a show-off.
not necessarily in that order.
I know it sounds corny, but it's true.
I want to do something bigger than myself, something that has a real potential to help people in a serious way. I want to leave behind a legacy of good will when I'm wrom food.
I realize that programming free software is perhaps not the most noble thing one could possibly do, but it is what I'm good at. Free Software gives me the ability to use my skills as a programmer to do something really great, even if it is small in the big picture.
Laugh at it if you want, but that's the reason I write Free Software, not because of ego, or because I can, but because I believe that I am helping people --and that makes me feel good.
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''Politicians make a decent salary, but generally much less than they could make in private industry. You might just as well ask the congressman why he puts his time and energy into public service.
The answer is probably similar for Open Source/Free software people 1) there's a certain satisfaction in doing something you feel is worthwhile, 2) the desire to leave the world a little better than when you found it, 3) recognition by your peers is very motivating, 4) even if you don't make money directly, it can help with your later career.
Another thing to keep in mind is that most of us entered the IT field because we have a passion for the technology. The reality of most corporate work is that we never get to do the really cool stuff that we dreamt about in school - real work is pretty mundane. Working on something more interesting on the side lets us do the stuff we dreamt of doing when we entered the field.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I know a retired Grumman engineer who builds model planes in his basement. Nobody seems shocked.
I've got a friend who builds model trains in his basement -- not for profit! Imagine that!
My sister likes to bake things. And get this -- she does it just for the sheer enjoyment! Can you believe it? The mind boggles!
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Naw, we don't do it for beautiful women. That's a troll. Any geek knows that beautiful women are attracted to money, not the fruits of the labor of Open Source.
Some say we do it for hubris.
We do it because we don't wanna grow up. Grown ups do things for money. We do it for love, pure and unabashed. Like children do what they do.
-Water Paradox
information is immaterial
We support, contribute to, and use open source because we all thrive on the increased knowledge base. A good analogy could be when you have friends and family over for dinner. Most people don't go the cheap route when entertaining, and we don't charge admission. However, the idea stands that those people will do likewise at some point and invite you over for a nice dinner. With open source, it's like a buffet of knowledge, and most of the items are very decent. I can go to this buffet of knowledge and expand my own mind--what a high that is! As my knowledge grows, my contribution back to the buffet is greater. In the end, everyone dining at this knowledge buffet has become a more intelligent person, and not just through coding--we have social interactions at conferences, via email & chats, etc., so we learn about other people as well.
We all want a better world to live in, and many of this believe the way to get there is for people to become more educated. Open Source software is but one approach to this (although it is a major one, given how automated the world has become and how much more automated it will continue to become). Companies who hoard their knowledge and code are analogous to the scribes during the Medieval Times who were the only ones who knew how to read and write, and refused to share that knowledge in the belief that commoners lacked the capacity to learn (hoarding this knowledge was a tool to maintain power, as well).
I've found that, as I get older, money isn't the all pervasive motivator I thought it would be.
Once I had enough money to 'get by' on, the raises didn't have as big an impact on my life. I found that I wanted to do things not to increace my financial bottom line, but for other motivations.
Why did I give away my last car? Because it was 'worth more' to someone that didn't have a car than the 'financial worth' I could get from selling it.
Why do people 'donate' to the open source movement? Because they're motivated by things other than money. That's a hard concept for some people to accept.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Being in my mid fifties, I can remember that back in the old days people did things that evoked the same questions (built telescopes, ham radio & so on). I think the basic answer is the same as then, its fun, I enjoy it, the challenge is exciting & so on. And as hobbies go (does anyone use that word anymore) you get to show off your end product, be appreciated for you cleverness and otherwise display your multitude of talents. Certainly that seems more rewarding than, say, crossword puzzles which consume a huge amount of human effort. Throw in some of the more obnoxious software vendor behavior (lead by Microsoft who, I am sure in my heart, would really like to charge a fee every time you turn on your computer) and the easy colaberation offered by the Internet and you have a combination that is impossible to resist. Something challenging & constructive, a chance to interact with your peers and defeat evil. Who could ask for more from their free time!
I'm developing open-source software because I enjoy programming. That's it. And it is fun to work with other enthusiasts, unlike office programming where most developers don't even know how to format a disc (at least in the company I work, it amazes me how little all those programmers know). The reason to publish the source is simply that it increases the chance of being known as a programmer, it enhances my "fame", if you'd like to call it this way. Others are able to correct my errors and mistakes, so I also learn WHAT errors and mistakes I make. It's no use writing some closed-source app as a hobby that is full of bugs, design flaws and release it as Shareware or whatever, 'cause noone would use it. If it's open-source, it gets corrected and grows faster, thus gets more useful. Marc Haisenko The 3Dsia Project (http://www.3dsia.org)
because with humans, after you get past
the first tier of needs (money, security,
place to eat and sleep), you get higher
level needs kicking in, and those include
needs to contribute and be part of a community.
Social Threefolding
I've done a lot of different kinds of volunteer work. I like it because it makes me feel like I am helping the world be a better place. Writing free software gives me the same feeling, only better.
Why is it better than volunteering at a school or helping set up a public education event? Because those things can only reach a small number of people and then they fade away. Open Source software can help many many people from now until... well, forever? And what I do can either improve something that already exists or it can become the basis of new things that help even more people.
On a purely selfish note it is also a way to advertise your expertise. And, a great way to learn. What better way to learn than to write something as well as you can and then expose it to the world and be told what is wrong with it and how to fix it?
Stonewolf
Well, if I was Willie Sutton, I might reply "...because that's there the money is", but the truth in the matter is that I enjoy the challenge and mental activity in the same fashion that my friends enjoy the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle.
It's a game with myself to see how well I can write a program to do foo, and it builds my skills and cognitive thinking abilities, from which I do earn a paycheck from. If someone else can learn from my example, or find use of it, or even build a billion dollar industry from it, great!, just send me a nice thank you card on the way (if it's the billion dollar industry I'll settle for a Z8 from BMW, red please).
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
It would probably be because I couldn't make any money out of it, ofcourse... If I could do that, I would.
Will work for bandwidth
That particular sentiment just happens to produce better software.
And better everything else too.
"Upgrade your grey matter, 'cause one day it may matter." --Deltron Zero
Basically what it comes down to, for me and me alone, is one of two things:
Obviously, the first motivation applies more to small projects while the second applies to larger projects. There's a little bit of "scratch an itch" about it, maybe a little bit of altruism, maybe even a little bit of ego (in assuming that the world needs my brain-droppings). What is absent, for me, is any thought of reward - either monetary or otherwise. Sure, it's wonderful when I find out that my code helped someone, or that they learned something by looking at it. It's also wonderful when someone else builds on your ideas and creates something else that's cool. I won't deny the "rush" that comes from these things, but it's just not why I do it. When it comes right down to it, I do it because I can.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
1. For the same reason that many teachers teach (in the US anyway). It isn't for the money; teachers in the US are woefully underpaid. If teaching were done for the money, the only people who would teach would be the folks not smart enough to get a better paying job. Many teachers are driven by a passion to help kids and improve the world around them. Likewise, many Open Source people are driven by the desire to improve the world and help people.
2. In a culture that praises beauty and physical prowess, geeks often feel out of step or second class. In the Open Source world, they get a chance to strut their stuff and be applauded for their technical talents. Praise goes a long way for a lot of folks.
3. Coz playing with technology is fun if you're a geek! And it doesn't cost nearly as much as the golf habit that many corporate executives have.
-- Russell Pavlicek
Richard Stallman
XML causes global warming.
I was thinking about this recently when checking out a news story on ZDNet, and reading someone's comment that "Open Source was communism".
The statement irritated me, but I didn't know why. Which is usually when I start doing some research, because not knowing why I'm irritated means there's something important to figure out.
I use open source in my own work - from development, web pages, graphical images, and the like. I could say "because it's cheap", and that would be true. I don't have a lot of cash, so most free (as in beer) programs appeal to me.
But there's two big reasons why I use Open Source software:
1: Free (as in speech) idea. Take Sun, who's setting up StarOffice to use XML as their default documents. XML - an open standard. What happens if 10 years from now I want to open a file, a story, an article I wrote in XML? I'd be able to read it, because I wouldn't be worried that MS went out of business/Caldera dropped Wordperfect/Lotus died out, or that the document editor I originally wrote didn't work on my new OS.
OS is democracy in its truest form (not like the US, which is a *republic*, thank you very much). Everyone has a voice, good, bad, or indifferent. It can't be bought out by business (which tries to force customers down a path to make it more money, sometimes when the customer doesn't want to go that way). It can't be subverted by government. The users, and the users alone, have the power to decide if a program lives or dies.
OS is also true innovation. The idea that "necessity is the mother of invention" applies here. If someone has that "itch they need to scratch" (like a program to edit tons of graphics from the command line (thank you ImageMagick!), it gets done. And just like the Internet is a place where you can find people that have the same interest as yourself, you can always find someone who has that same itch they need scratched, and sometimes people who are better than you at scratching it. (Which usually means you've got to have some humility to work with OS software.)
2: Most people comment on how OS software is so stable, and I've proven that time and time again. Why so stable? Because everybody can see the mistakes. Granted, your "ordinary users" (aka, non-developers) won't care. But to folks who's jobs deal with security, or reliability, the capacity to see why your program broke down and, even if you can't fix it yourself, at least tell other people why it happened so the developer can fix it makes the system that much stronger.
Right now, OS has overcome the first few hurdles of any system. First we had programs that work, now we have programs that work well. People have seen the need to make these programs more user friendly, and I see this being the next stage of OS software (companies like Mandrake are really setting good examples here). Interfaces will evolve - but they will evolve well, because thousands of voices will decide what works and what doesn't.
In the end, I truly believe that Open Source programs are the way to go. It makes business sense to do so (now I've harnessed the collective brain power of a *planet* to help with my projects - I just have to let go of the idea that I *own* the software, and I'll get software that will make my business better). It makes personal sense to do so (I know that my improvements to OS programs will help other people).
Of course, I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
(any lawyers out there want to add to the list?)
A congressman will be familiar with lawyers, and probably has a legal background himself, so comparing open source to legal pro bono work will put him on familiar ground and give you a shared context. Eg, ask "how would you feel if a big law firm called Pro Bono work 'unamerican'?")
Of course there are also all the commercial reasons why companies produce open source code. Its worth emphasising that many open source coders are actually employed to do it, so its not just a geek hobby. See Opensource.org for all the commercial reasons for releasing open source.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
Yes, but at -1, not +2. Asshole. Yeah, check out my comments to see just how easy it is to grab mod points...
One reason people do open source software could be compared to scientific research. Sure there are a lot of things researched to make someone a lot of money. But there are other things (a lot of times less glamorous but still important... think foundation work) that people work on simply because they know it can be done, and it'd be a shame to know that there's something that should have been discovered but hasn't been because no one's paying attention to it.
For me, the motivation is the idea that software these days can be so buggy and so non-intuitive (user interface), and there's really no reason why it couldn't be... no reason why we can't come up with completely new and different ideas on what it means to have a gui (are windows really a neccessity? could there be something easier? [resist the stupid doors joke]) or what really differentiates an OS from an Application. Stuff like that. If no company makes it, then I will.
That's why I'll always want open source.
...cus the voices in my head tell me to.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
and modified even less (when it comes to open-source projects, at least). But I can say that one of the following reasons is always involved when I spend time or effort on developing or using free, open-source software.
- I like having an alternative. Where do I go if I'm not happy with Microsoft's OS and there are no alternatives?
- I like using high-quality products. But I can't always afford them. Adobe Photoshop is a prime example. I get to use it at work a bit, and I love it. But I really don't want to pirate it or use it illegally, so at home I use GIMP, which is an incredible piece of software.
- I want progress in software. If everyone locked everything down and never shared any innovations, software would evolve about as fast as humans have (no offense, Creationists).
- I want interoperability. All this openess means open standards. Open standards mean easier interoperability between software systems. Easier, more painless migrations from one OS or software package to another. Smarter software systems that can "talk" to each other easily.
Eh, just my opinions.
My sigs always suck.
So I can't offer insight on why developers do it, but as a user, I use it because it's better than paying for software that doesn't and CAN'T fulfill my needs because only a limited set of developers at the 'company' are allowed to make changes. I can't wait until the full Kapital release comes out. Yes, it's proprietary and a paid for program, but it's one of the last reasons I'm stuck with Windows for important personal stuff. And the KDE developers have so much other really wonderful completely free stuff, that paying $50 for one program out of an entire desktop full of OpenSource software is a very minute price to pay. This isn't meant to be a Windows rant, it's more of a slashdottian comparison of why many here find Linux and OpenSource in general so much better.
I believe the majority of the book is available at Eric's homepage.
IMHO, there are only three real reasons why people contribute to Open Source:
- The GPL and similar licenses force you to share your enhancements. Sure, you can keep the binaries to yourself, but if you want anyone else to use it, you must give them the source code. There's no way around that.
- Open Source developers understand that the only way Open Source works is if people contribute to it. So if you benefit from other people's work, it's only fair if you contribute to it yourself (assuming you're a programmer). If you use GPL software and create your own software, you understand that you promote the idea of Open Source every time you create new Open Source code and distribute it. It's a version of "voting with your dollars", except you're actually "voting with your code".
- Most programmers realize that selling software they develop is difficult. The marketing and support issues are time-consuming and expensive. If you want to develop a piece of software that you don't think is going to sell well, you may as well make it Open Source. You lose almost nothing, and you benefit others. Reasons for writing this kind of software include:
- You need the software for yourself, and no one is going to write it for you
- As a hobbiest programmer, you just like writing code. Some people like ham radio, others like building models, you like writing code.
I don't relieve belive the "prestige" factor that much. I don't think programmers out there really write that much code just so that they can impress others. In a meritocracy, that sort of thing isn't generally acknowledged.And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
I use and develop opensource because I want our society to become a Borg Collective. I figure if we start small by sharing our resources to develop code and the like, it won't be long before we start networking our neural processes, installing really wild implants, and flying around in big square ships.
1 of 6,000,000,000
That's why I feel obliqued to return something to the community that provides the software I use. Others do webdesign, translations of documentation, organization of shows, writting new software, whatever. I'm rather good (I think) at writting software, so that's what I do.
Regards,
Tobias
Regards, Tobias
NPR had Salman Rushdie on The Connection today. A caller asked why some of his novels were, or were not, set in India. After circling around the question a bit, Rushdie said
In the end, you write the book that grabs
you by the throat and demands to be written.
That's more or less how I feel about writing open source software.
For the good of humanity
If there existed software based on open standards
and of excellent quality that could be used to
complete our projects, we would not bother to
write open source. However, software companies
are motivated not just by profit, but by
short term, short sighted, ideals of 'easy to do'.
If a software company finds it can make 80% of the
money with 80% of the quality, they will do that.
The people who require software capable of working
in that top 20% have no choice but to write their
own.
As developers, we seek the respect and recognition of our peers, with that motivation often taking priority over money. Open-source allows the prefect vehicle to show our work to and share with that peer audience.
Why do people paint? Why do amateurs play an instrument? Why is it that they are, most of the time, much more talented than the professionals?
The quote is not perfect, I didn't write down his exact words but the spirit is here. We are amateurs. We are what Rock'n Roll was before the major music distribution companies took over the business and squeezed everything we loved about Rock out of it. We are amateurs, we tour the country in buses, not planes. We do it for the love of the game. If we get good at it, money and chicks start coming, that's good :-) but that's not the goal.
Haim.
Looking for a great online backup: Green Backup
Open source is the Boston Tea Party for software developers. I went to school and studied on my own for countless hours (years!) to learn a trade I could market. I then find myself being controlled by major corporations (Redmond) and business owners (bosses). I have the power to free myself of this control which is forced on me against my will. I develop and support open source software for the Liberty it ascribes to my chosen lifestyle. With open source I control my destiny and strike a blow for freedom from oppression and control.
Plain and simple.
Not that I get to do it much. But there is a thrill in hunting down a bug and submitting a bug report, knowing that you are contributing to the greater good of mankind.
~Sean
Despite the rhetoric. Communal effort can have a good effect in a democratic capitolist society(before you flame I am not anti capitolist, quite the contrary). Supply and demand economics require a limited supply, in software great effort is spent making the appearance of limited supply... hence much of the stuff we 'love' about MS.
The fact is software once written is extrodinarily cheap to copy. In a communal software enviornment everyone benifits. People who wish a better product have the right to make any product so, and they don't lose anything(as in a commodity) by giving it away. This of course will not work with cars or any other material item as there is an actual limit on supply.
Just because something can make a profit doesn't mean it neccisarily should. Some unnamed companies say they are innovating but if they would let the open source community do their thing they could make something new and actually innovate and then EVERYONE would benefit.
Why doesn't this happen? When you have a product that is making gobs of money why bother! Now the interesting thing is IMHO this is not the corporations fault. This is what the corporation is supposed to do, make money and provide jobs. It is the CONSUMER's responsibility to make sure they are not being abused by the corporation and the GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE's responsibility to provide the consumer with the channels to do so.
So get off your chairs and make a stink!
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
I'd say the reason I continue is that I enjoy coding and software development, and since I don't work as a developer, or in IT at all, joining a project is kind of like the coding version of those sports fantasy camps -- I get to work, hang with and learn from some really skilled people and at the end, my work is on CD's and hard drives all over the world.
I don't do it because I hate Microsoft, and I've never met anyone who does. If they're motivated by hate, it's of a competing free software project! ;-) I don't do it because I want to destroy paid development and put people out of work, and I've never met anyone who does. (I do wonder if I coded for a living, whether I'd be so willing to work for free.)
Eric Raymond says people work on free projects to get girls. Eric Raymond should generally be ignored.
Now, if I can ask a question:
Answering this question may be the key to resolving public FUD about open source.
Huh? How?
Why I do it? Good question!
...) and specific programming languages (C/C++, Perl, Python, Java). Before the Linux revelation, when I was just a DOS/Windows user, I didn't know about sharing, giving away and this seems to be related somehow with the Proprietary Software Culture. Even today, you will still find very few free VB or Deplhi programs.
The simplest and best answer is because it gives me pleasure. I don't think any other answer would be true. It involves daily work, sometimes in crazy amounts. I have no hopes that this work will make me rich, also I'm realistic enough to not believe that I will be one day as prestigious like ESR or others.
It is my passion, it always was. I like to stay in front of my computer 12 hours a day, I like to write software, I like to give it away, I like to be critiqued about my mistakes, I like to surf the WEB, these are the simple things which make my day, and I am happy about them.
On the other hand, it is something related to some specific "cultures". If you look, OpenSource/Free software is more pregnant around specific platforms (Linux, BSD, Be,
Because you can.
Because it is there.
Because the best hack is the one that does the same job, only in less time with fewer lines of code.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Why do the schools and universities give away information. Sure, teachers get payed to do it, but after you've been taught how the operator of addition works, you are free to apply it as you see fit. Fortunately for all of use, the people who build bridges, design cars, and build houses have all gotten rather good at applying addition. They use a lot of other technique and methods taught to them by people who could have kept a tight lip and made an extra buck by imposing unneeded scarcity.
Software is not a bridge or a house or a car. To have a house I have to get a group of people, a mess of materials, and take a good amount of time to construct it. To have another house just like the first, I have to get another group of people, another mess of materials, and more time to construct it. It is the only way it can be done, at least until we master some form of science that will allow us to will objects into existence.
If I want to have a program, I have to get a groups of people, a mess of resources (computers, etc.), and take good amount of time to code it. To have a second program just like the first, I have to make a copy of the media containing the original. Any other restriction is artificially imposed.
Suppose we treat software like the information that teachers give students. In order to do that, you have to include the source, since it is the only form of a program that really makes sense to people. Any other format is dependent on the platform where it will run. Teaching the information with student when it is in a binary format would be, at best, liken to teaching a student calculus in a language that is foreign to the student.
Now if we are going to treat the information in software like the information that teachers share with students, what would be possibly get out of it? How would software benefit? How would people benefit? Since it is not the mainstream, it is kind of hard to point at something concrete and say "There! That is the benefit." There are plenty of reason to that people give as to why they believe Open Source is better or why people do it, but nothing that some one else could brush off since the is no hard evidence yet. Instead, let's looks at what we could gain.
How safe would you feel if our architects had to discover addition on their own? No one taught them because the teach would loose an edge over any one he taught. Suppose that the bridge designers were not allowed to look at other bridge to learn how to build one for you. Suppose the person who made your car wasn't allowed to look under the hood of another car before designing a "better" one for you. Suppose your mechanic wasn't allowed to know how your car was designed. Supposed the carpenter who build you house wasn't allow to even touch a hammer due to legal regulations.
This is were the software industry has gotten itself. By share source code to programs, some feed up people have realized that they have more to gain if they share their ideas. This sharing requires that they people whom they share with be allowed to apply those idea in the hopes of producing better ideas that would again be shared with others. These people don't have to build bridges without ever having seen one before.
So why do open source. My wife might have to fly on an airplane some where and the air traffic control system must work. My son might end up on a naval vessel and he could not afford the ship going dead because of divide by zero error. My mother may have to go into the hospital for surgery and she wouldn't want to have the wrong operation performed due to an error in the doctor's calendar system.
If you've every had to drive on a large bridge over a river, consider how you would feel if you were told the bridge made by someone who had never seen one first. Would you enter any skyscraper made by some one who had never so much as walked in one themselves? That's why you do Open Source.
Dan
The act of creation itself is what pays and rewards open source programmers. While programming has a much more practical side to it than the "purer" arts, it certainly isn't a hard science. You can a great sense of satisfaction from knowing that out of nothing you have forged a new tool that others can use and find useful or get enjoyment from.
Once all this hype about capitalism blows over, we will begin to realize that life isn't always about making a buck. It's also about doing stuff you really love.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
As I understand his question, he wants to know why we do it for free, not simply why we do it.
And the reason I think is: because it's much deeper in human nature to create for fun, than simply to produce for profit. This makes us closer to God.
I write open source because I end up with better software. Whenever I used closed source software,
I am frustrated by some functionality it doesn't have or some feature that is broken. What I wouldn't give to hack MS Word so that the dumb
numbered lists worked properly!
Organized open source efforts enable us to collaborate, ending up with better software for
everyone.
To meet chicks.
A lot of it, at least for me, has something to do with the idea of giving back. "Opensource", in various forms, has been around for a long time and essentially in the form of community effort. Whether that effort be aimed at building a house for a newly wed couple, or developing a "free" operating system, the underlying premise of being part of something "more" is there. What's rather unique about Opensource though is that it allows, in fact encourages, a community based on creativity and thought. It's a method of speeding up what happens with ideas and projects anyways, which is an evolution. One man takes a stick used for digging holes and sticks a piece of rock on the end of it to pound in wooden spikes, another replaces the rock with a metal head, now it can break rocks. Opensource simply acknowledges the fact that this happens with ideas, and embraces it, with the expectation that something better might come along much quicker.
We've built a country, almost a world, based purely on economy. If someone doesn't see where the money is coming from they shake their head puzzled. Then they return to their unsatisfying life and unfulfilling job trying to fill the holes in their life with wads of little green paper.
Opensource reflects and satisfies both facets of our human nature, altruism and selfishness. The question people should be asking is, "Why Don't You Do It Too?"
if you're looking to money as your prime motivating factor, eventually you have to ask yourself what you'd do if you had all the money you could want. if you say, "end world hunger," then OK, imagine that's done: now what do you do?
;)
if what you really want to do is to play with computers, or build systems, or figure out how information works... you might consider writing free software with all the spare time you get from having a zillion dollars.
how come nobody ever asks why people watch tv for five hours a day when nobody's paying them too? probably because most people have a very rigidly binary idea about activities: things you get paid for doing, and things you pay to do. of course, the lines are never that clear.
nobody ever asks me why i spend time and money fixing up my house; that's a lot of work, and it's something people get paid to do. strangely, people don't even find it surprising that i'll go over and help a friend fix their house or their car. after all, a saturday afternoon spent in a friend's garage with a cooler of cold ones is a totally all-american way to spend your time.
i don't see writing free software, or building free systems, as being much different from a bunch of people tinkering around with an old car; it only seems wierd because 10,000 people can't fit in a garage
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Here's a quote from another Slashdot-linked website that deals with this idea:
When does open source make sense?
Who knows who wrote the paperclip in MS office? If it where open source, you could go to his house and shoot him.
Does anyone program during the day?
First off, every person has his or her own motivations. So this will never be a complete or even very acurate list.
;-)
;-) A good story on this is Michael's reasoning to the Mexican goverment.. they could save over 400 $ USD by using linux instead of Microsoft's products. For companies and countries alike this can be a big plus.
.. compare our cute Tux pengiun to the windows flag ... you have to admit, its a lot more cudable right!?
However, in my experiance and perspective, the folowing factors play a role:
* Learning abilities in Universities teaching OS design need good tools and source to show what an OS is, does, and develops over time. Linux is an obvious posibility here
* Learning to program. A newbie programmer (taking classes, or as hobie) need a furtile ground to learn the tricks of the trade, they also need skilled people they can questions, and they need 'real life projects' to truely get into it. Ofcource open-source provides all of the above. Gnome for C UI programming, KDE for C++ UI programming, and all base GNU tools for low-level C coding.. Also, linux offers a wide range of languages (from bash, awk to fortran, pascal, c, c++ and java)
* Peer review. People love to hear they are genious. People love to be apreciated for there work. Open source offers the posibility to achive just this.
* 'The itch'. A populair expression in open-source development, often cited as a big reason. if one is using a program which is 'almost right', but has this one anoying bug, or this one feature missing, in open-source it is quite 'easy' to fix it, or add to it. Basicly it allows to 'scratch that itch'.
* Security. Many people are afraid that bugs will be left unfixed in comercial products (and not be able to do anything about this, see above). So they prefer software where many other hackers have looked at. Also the chance of back-door's are a lot less likely in opensource projects, its very difficult to hide virii or back doors in source code
* Political or ethical points of views. The its-not-microsoft factor can be important to some people. They hate the bloat, or the blue screen of deaths, or just think bill gates is not a nice person.. Whatever the reasoning behind it is, they think 'big comercial company' is bad and 'underdog' is good.
* Support for standards. Open source almost always creates open standards. Allowing, by its very nature, the competition to build a competing product, which is interchangeble at any document or protocol level. You would 'never' see a open source project create a 'properitaire standard', or modify existing standards without publishing every bit of documentation and source code. Remeber, this is how TCP/IP, ethernet, the Web, ftp, dns, etc came into existance. Had these been closed propriatairie standards, the internet as we know it would not have existed!
* Innovation. By its very nature, open source stimulates a darwinistic development. Several projects who achive to do the same thing, and the best one will recieve the most support and resources, thus growing faster and getting even better. It also allows for totaly new and crazy idea's to be invented and implimented, and who knows, it might be genious, and catch on like wild-fire.. Many big companies try to simulate this in 'brain labs', but they will never achive the same level of darwinistic development, since the company can only release one product, and has to 'play it safe'
* Cost. linux and many powerfull tools that run on it, is free. For home users, students and poor people alike, this offers the only choice to have a good computing platform. For other people it just saves a lot of money
* Support. There's a lot of support (mailing lists, open bug systems, friendly helping people) available for almost all linux software. This makes learning and using a lot easier.
* The ability to 'Change the world'. An individual can not steer the direction Microsoft or any big company is going, and thus cannot control the direction of computing in general.. In linux they can! By being able to contribute idea's and write your own versions of tools, or invent new ones, one can now 'steer' the way computing will work in the world. So it allows an individual to 'matter' in the bigger picture.
* Last but not least
Anyways, i'm sure there's more a lot of other points out there, but for me, these are the reasons why i like open-source development.
The question was: Why do you make Open Source Software, not Why do you make software. Many posts in here refer to the main reason:
Because I have a problem that needs to be solved
Actually this is the reason for developing software, not specificly opensource or closedsorce, free or commercial.
The simplest answer is: we don't write code for free. Almost all programmers who work full time on an open source project are paid for it. There is a limited number of large-scale, successful open source projects (gcc, linux, apache, xfree, mozilla, gnome, postgres, and a few others). All of them have large sums of corporate or university money to pay professional programmers to work on them. Mozilla has _always_ had significant funding; gcc has had significant funding for over 10 years (cygnus); the linux kernel has $1 BILLION pumped into it a year by IBM. This myth of "hordes of free programmers collaborating over the internet voluntarily" is almost entirely false.
Next time you look in the "acknowledgements" section of an open source project, look at how many people actually contributed more than a few lines of code or a bug fix. Generally, the number of people who have _significantly_ contributed is less than 5, and those 5 are usually _all_ paid to do it.
1. To gain respect and notoriety within the development community. i.e. personal gain.
2. To punish those we feel hurt us, our community or our profession. e.g. Microsoft's negative effects on the openness of the Internet.
3. Good will feelings, kindness to others.
4. To change things, mix it up, cause trouble. i.e. it's fun!
One of the amazing things about open-source - it's regenerative. As people leave a project, more join in. Each adding their expertise to the product. Companies like Microsoft are not going to be able to compete with this kind of system. They are going to have to evolve, or die.
-- "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
There's a business case for it too, there's a reason IBM has suddenly become all about Linux, and it's not because IBM is stupid. It's because they know how to make money off of it.
1. We do it for the same reasons that people volunteer at their church, their school, or for their favorite charity. And like all charity work, we are seeking to better the lives of those around us.
2. We do it to create a better world, and to better ourselves. By examining the work of other, better people, we improve ourselves. By placing work that we have done in the public domain, that work is critiqued, analyzed, and fixed by other, better people. We learn from our mistakes, and we continue on, a better person working for a better society.
3. We do it because we have grown up in a kinder, gentler era. We do not have hidden agendas because we are more open, and more honest than those before us -- because those before us have made this a safer world. Communism has fallen, dictators are being deposed, the economy is speeding along, unemployment is low, so the morale and optimism of the people at large is very high. In this situation, it is hard not to be altruistic.
While free software may not seem like it can change the world, it can more easily, and more cheaply bring the benefits of computers to our schools, our children, and to the poorer nations of the world. When the price of licensing software is the same as the price of purchasing the computer, and when software is, or must be, updated as often as two or three times during the life of the computer, one can see that free software cuts the total cost of ownership by 50-75%.
I'd say that there's an expectation that good rudiments to make (on the case, computer) hardware perform are expected, and the semiconductor industry's done a great job of helping make the low bar grabbable.
There's a second component, documentation, which reflects desires to see things done right (or at least without economic spillover,) compatibly, or both.
On the other hand, for those with a little more stamina, it's good to be able to run from a deck on top of that bar to a high level, and that's what's being made whole now. Middleware has expanded so that educational and business environments have freeware or open components, plus more proprietary ones; it accomodates profitability, introduction for intellectual property of myriad type and domain, plus learnability across those.
So here we see a sort of apocalyptic crash happening for people who were bridging domains or selling telecommunications at a price, matched by a buildup of automated free and less-free services, markets for real estate, hard goods, IP, and other bits of semi-based real estate.
Second, take everything business management theorists have ever written about employee motivation and team cohesion. You might notice the theme "respect" repeated over and over again. There are many extremely good programmers in companies that don't release code, but there is still a wealth of top-notch coders who publish open-source code, read other people's code, and provide criticism to other coders. It is a big kick to hear an awesome coder praise your work, and this community bears a strong incentive to try to impress them.
Third, one gets to communicate one's successes and struggles to the outside world. Did you spend two weeks writing a really complex block of simulation code? If the project is closed, then people only see the little button to trigger the event. If the project is open everyone can see how cool you really are. Is this important? Compare to other professions -- would doctors or lawyers agree with closing all of their work, and never sharing research?
I am currently running 4 open-source projects, and contributing to 3 more. I work way too many hours, but the 3 previous points basically summarize my motivations and what I get out of it.
After college, most of us do not find ourselves in an environment that encourages education. Working with OSS helps build your own educational environment. And there's something else: somewhere in the Bible Christ encourages some multitude not to "hide your light under a bushel". (I am not Christian; perhaps someone else can provide the quote.) The language is archaic, but I think it has meaning in that from the moment I exposed my code to the outside world I improved as a coder. For whatever reasons, first among them being the consideration of others in previously private efforts, I have found that writing OSS code makes me more professional.
Oh, and please thank Boucher from some pleased Californians.
I Write OpenSource Software called iSQL-Viewer
I Love to code simply put.
Creating software is an outlet for me versus making a log cabin out of toothpicks some other wierd obscure hobby. I get to write whatever i want how i want and i can share this with others. I learn more on edge progamming styles and techniques than i would at work because at work it is the same ol thing every damn day (* for to do while i <= boss *)
Overall open-source software has a nice symbiotic thing going on. I write code, then everyone else can benift from my work cause they can use my tool and or build upon it to make something they need.
Plus it is nice to get peer recognition cause most other recognition is really trivial and not important.
For me coding is a lot of fun. I don't really care that I'm not making any money on some of my projects. But we also get paid in other ways. Namely recognition. It's nice to be recognized for something you do, for me even more so than getting paid. The whole feeling that I may have made life a little easier for someone else is pretty nice too. :-)
All the cool kids are doing it.
1. Sick of paying outragous prices for software.
2. More resources to go to to solve problems when working in open source OS'es, Verses M$, and MAC which hide things.
3. If my code could be helped by changes to the core of the OS, I can write that change and even propose it to be included in the OS for everyone.
4. Same for Applications such as apache, if I write a mod for Apache it might even become part of Apache.
5. Get recognised my work as a person, not as a nebulous group that might or might not get a personal credit.
6. In somecases becuase its the only choice, if i write a driver for some companies hardware so it will work in my Linux Box I certainly can't try and sell it, they would Sue me over IP rights. Byt if I give it away well then I think thats much less likely anyway.
7. Because wide colaboration by many people makes for better code, less bugs overtime, and dfinately better testing by a diverse set of hardware/software conbinations.
8. My code could be useful elsewhere, if I write a program for windows, if probably only ever going to run on windows. If I write a program for Linux/BSD/or another Open OS...well it will probably run on Linux/BSD/Solaris/Windows/or something thats not even there yet, it might get translated into lanugages I don't even speak.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
"Don't want money. Got money. Want love."
Nuff said. ;)
He tells them that open source is how every other industry works.
When I buy a car, I can take it apart and see how it works. I can even modify its workings. If I tried to fix a bug in a closed source program I could be sent to jail per the EULA.
It is important that lawmakers know that open source is not just a hairy programmer working late nights in his spare bedroom on a program he intends to give away. There are companies out there that have fully embraced open source because it's better for the consumer.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Because it's for the betterment of our knowledge.
Same with Open Source. Not the only reason of course, but it's a good way to start a conversation explaining what open source is.
Selling of cookbook containing recipes is another good analogy.
- Payback for software I use
- Idealism of free (beer)
- Self expression
- Volunteerism
AlpineRThe best OS I've found to run simulations for my research is Linux. I'm indebted to the writers of the kernel, the GNU tools, gcc, plotutils, NEdit and much more. These were free to me monetarily, but writing software allows me to repay in kind.
Software or information that costs $0.00 is infinitely better than that which costs $0.01. It can be copied, shared, and disbursed without hindrance. This openness leads to more users, which in turn promotes the development of better software. Free software is also far more useful. Consider how the growth of the US would be hampered if our interstates were privately owned toll roads rather than free-to-use public property.
My job title is not computer scientist or network administrator, but computer programming is a valuable skill I possess. I write software as an outlet for my imagination and get pleasure from having my work appreciated by others.
Many of us want to improve our society as a whole. I volunteer for Habitat for Humanity, the Detroit Project, and other charitable activities. Writing open source software is a way to help others escape from bad software and corporate greed.
Because it exists,
Maybe it will help someone else, either as a user or as a coder working on a problem that was solved in some bit of code. I know all too often running through code and seeing other solutions to problems I myself have run into. It's a great way to go Ooooh I could have done this instead. Whilst somewhere some sot gets an invisible ego boost (kinda like being modded up).
Signed JerryMeander
Freeware is free as in freedom, but there is a cost. But instead of exchanging money for the software, users pay for free software by contributing fixes and enhancements back to the maintainers (and thus the users), by writing how-tos and documentation, and by answering questions and giving advice to fellow users on message boards and newsgroups. Free software is paid for in human energy. Why do we give software away for free? We don't. We give it away for freedom, and are repaid in human energy.
As the userbase of free software grows, we get to an area where only a small percentage of the users are actively participating in this exchange of software for ideas and energy. But that's ok... What's one percent of a million users? Ten thousand people modifying, patching, discussing, improving, advising, flaming, and promoting the use of your software really doesn't suck, even if there's nine-hundred and ninety thousand people who just use and (hopefully) be happy. The active users, in effect, pay for the software with their activity on behalf of everybody... But in doing so, it doesn't actually cost them more.
I write code because i enjoy it... in the same way that children enjoy LEGO's, and people enjoy mind games. I also write the code because I want my computer to either do something it can't or because it can do what i want, but not how i want.
I give it away because selling it would involve setting up the whole small business thing, and dealing with customer's bitching and whining (and having to listen to them)...
If you're gonna write it for yourself or for fun, what's the point of keeping it to yourself? Adn if you're doing it for fun then then why would you want to deal with the unpleasantness of unhappy customers (which is about the most unfun thing in the world).
We were taught in art theory class that Art is "recto ratio factibilium" or "The right making of the thing to be made." When developers program for money, we have to make sacrifices in the quality of our work to meet deadlines and sometimes hairbrained requirements. When developers program for free, we have the rare luxury of making things right.
In the grand scheme of things that make up computer stuff, I think I can say that Open Source exists to do more than serving egos...
How about the Digital Divide, eh? I don't mind buying computer hardware, but the most expensive crap is the software - the bare necessities that make a computer usable with people like myself are just too damn expensive because if we only think computer technology is only the realm of Microsoft.
Why is it that all of the marketing for crappy software and hardware products (Uh... Norton Utilities/Antivirus, Iomega Peerless drives, etc.) are made around the fact that computers will crash every time you use 'em? Why are people so damn complacent if their closed-source software crashes or is targeted for viruses? If I share a ride in somebody's car, do I think I'll crash and burn and die every time I'm sittin in the back seat? No. The driver is probably smart enough to keep the car in shape. If I use a Linux box for home again, do I want to worry about crashes? No! The people who make the software work want to fix stuff for a change.
Open Source takes computer programming and its refinement from the hands of big-ass corporations to the most essential element: programmers and their minds.
And I would like to refer to this quote: To err is human, to repent divine; to persist devilish.
Reason I write (and USE) open source software. Because it does what I need to do. Plain, simple and straight forward.
There is an array of other reasons that people write and use open source, but my PRIMARY reason is to "scratch an itch" or complete whatever I need to complete.
Two (fake) Examples:
#1) I need software for a hotdog stand, I can't find any, or the software I found is too expensive. So I develop my own. Once I finish the software, I think it might be useful to others and that maybe
someone will improve it (and share the improvements), and therefore I will get a better piece of software so I release it open source.
#2) I need software for a hotdog stand, I can'f find any, or the software I found is too expensive. But I did find an open source pickle stand software that is similar to what I need to do. Rather than writing my own software from scratch, I modify the pickle stand to be a "generic" stand application, and I add a few features. I send the changes back to the orignal pickle stand author, and now we both have improved software and it is more useful to others, hopefully it will be more useful and get more development and continue to grow!
Those are just two very silly examples, but they show the (sometimes selfish) motivation for writing open source software.
By withholding source code and the freedom to alter it I am shackling those users who use my software to the degree that they come to rely on my software. Those shackles are as difficult to break free of as my software is difficult to replace. This is at the heart of why many open source advocates dislike Microsoft software.
The reason I would want to write open source software is rooted in the basis for my wanting to use it.
When I purchase a software license for my company I get a shrink-wrapped box with some CDs inside. I install the software (after perhaps contacting the software vendor and getting a license key to unlock it). I attempt to read the documentation to learn how it works, often times the available documentation isn't very good and I need to go to a class to use it. While implementing the software package I have to figure out how I should change the way I do things so that my practices comply with the methods available from the software package. Many things I would like to get done are not possible with that software package because it doesn't provide those features. I'm locked into whatever they give me to work with and I have very few options for customizations because of this.
Now this software package comes with support that I can renew every year. If I keep renewing my support I can get upgrades as they are released. If I chose not to upgrade to the newer version eventually soon I will no longer be supported. I have to upgrade the package on the vendors schedule not my own, because they are the ones that determine when support runs out on the version I may be using. Since there software has a minimum system requirement I also have to continue to upgrade the operating system that I am running and therefore the hardware that my systems are running because the new operating system is progressive and doesn't support the older hardware.
This upgrade cycle is necessary to maintain support from the software vendor. Software contains bugs. This is true of all software (except perhaps certain "Hello world" applications). Since the vendor is the only company that has the source code they are the only ones that can support the software. They control something that I come to rely on for my business.
Now open software generally (by my experience) has better forums to discuss software problems and how it's used. You also have the option of going into the source code and making customizations that you need. All of the other people running the software also have this option. Chances are if you didn't have time or the expertise to make those changes or customizations to the software someone else might have. This is because many people have similar needs. Now if those people who made the customizations also contributed their changes back to everyone else you can use those contributions.
Also if you need your open source software to support your older system (which may be doing its job just fine and would otherwise be a waste of money and resources to upgrade) you have that option. Chances are if you have this need other people do as well and you all help each other out.
These are the reasons I use open source software.
When I write software and I release it open sourced my software becomes more useful by other people (who are also using it) who contribute to it and add back to my product. I get to enjoy their improvements as well. It's a two-way road.
I'm only 16 years old, and my contribution so far has been quite minor (only xml2swf is worth mentioning), but I shall list my reasons for it nevertheless:
First of all, it's about art. Many of the programmers do not treat their work as a job; it is rather a craft, and sometimes - though seldom - an art. And any craftsman has got the urge to create, to somehow demonstrate his skills and knowledge in front of his colleagues and other people. Secondly, it's about training: writing software is the best way to learn a technology, and a good program is a nice addition to anyone's CV or portfolio.
So far I'd described the reason why people write software on their own. The reason they choose to make it open is a matter of culture. Most of us can't expect to make a significant profit from the code written out there. Therefore, it is very easy to make a willingful concession of the slight possibility of a monetary gain in favor of the honor and the feeling of helping someone.
Open source is a boon for regular employees as well as independent developers. There are very visible people like Linus and Alan Cox, and thousands of less famous people, who are paid to work on open source because it benefits their employer - either directly as producing a product that they are able to make money with (redhat distribution, Mozilla/Netscape), or indirectly as a tool essential to their company's operation (Apache, perl, etc).
Then there are independent solution providers that take open source code and customize it for a specific customer - it may be a point of sale system, a database, or some other business solution that the developer has been contracted to provide. Using commercial software as a base limits customization and often increases costs. These guys get paid essentially to tweak the software for a specific customer - pretty much standing on the shoulders of giants and what-not. Any enhancements to the software are then paid for under contract, but also get fed back into the mainline for everyone else to benefit from.
So, you see, there are a substantial number of people who are plain old capitalists that are "giving away" their work but are also being compensated for it in true capitalist fashion.
I think any congresscritter should be able to easily understand these motivations. As for the it "scratches an itch" people, I'll let someone else talk about that philosophy.
Warning: dogma ahead. But sincerely-felt dogma.
I got my first computer only a couple of years ago. In the first week
I had it, I spent about 48 hours (20 consecutive) on the GNU website,
reading and re-reading everything they had, and finding out more about
the Free Software movement. The ideals of the Free Software
Foundation correspond very closely to my ideals for the world at
large. Although I last wrote a computer program in fifth-grade LOGO
class, I decided that I wanted to do my part, and slowly made the
transition from MacOS to GNU/Linux (first LinuxPPC, then Debian).
I think the freedoms that GNU describes -- to use, study, redistribute
and modify -- are essential, and because of the hard work of many
hackers, they are now within reach. I knew I wanted to write only
Free Software before I even knew how to code. I now have a job that
lets me write Free Software, and I will never take a job that requires
me to write non-free software. Maybe it was easy for me to make these
decisions because I made them before I learned to code.
Well, during the transition period between MacOS and GNU/Linux, I used
BBEdit, a good-but-proprietary editor, on the MacOS. When you edit
HTML with it there's a little check-box to "Give BBEdit Credit" --
embedding a little meta-creator tag saying that you'd written the HTML
in BBEdit. I always had to uncheck that box, because I was not using
BBEdit in a manner compliant with the terms of its license -- I had
not paid for it. Later, using the GIMP, when I saved an image in a
format that allowed embedded comments, I saw an option to say "Made
with the GIMP". I reflexively moved to uncheck the box -- after all,
I had not paid for the software. Then I realized that I was still
using it in compliance with its license, and I proudly, and giddily,
left the box checked: Made with the GIMP.
I now use, write and recommend only Free Software. I do it because
I'm a pretty hard-line GNU devotee, so that's obviously why I don't
call it "Open Source". I worry that there might not be enough people
who cherish the freedoms of Free Software, too many who think that
it's just cool and convenient. What the FSF, GNU, and other Free
Software projects have achieved is amazing and incredible. I write
Free Software because I believe it must exist, and I want my actions
to be in line with my beliefs.
I've just started writing open source software, but my reasons are for ego or the other reasons mentioned. I want my children to be able to read the applications I've written and learn from my mistakes. Regardless of how good or bad my code is, I want a part of what I do available to my kids when they ready to play with computers, if they decide to program.
I'd rather not get noticed or be famous. I enjoy writing useful code and learning new and better ways of doing some task or process.
<Heavy Philosophy>
It's because we know we're going to die. Truly beuatiful and artistic software can contain the soul ofthe author as truly as can a novel or a painting, so that even when we are extinguished (by death or by lesser forces), a piece of us will still exist. We won't nessesarily be remembered, but we will still (sort of) be alive.
I have weeks or monthes in which I feal that I've accomplished nothing and I barely exist. But then I get an e-mail from somebody who uses something I wrote a long time back and I realize that even as I'm stagnating here, I have an otherself which continues to express the best in me. And even if I completely and permanently loose myself in stupidity and conformity (or physical destruction), that piece will still be there.
And why open source? To get myself out as widely as possible.
I seriously wonder how much of human life can be attributed to this desire/fear. I could make a strong argument for all art, child-rearing, and nationalism stemming from this. What makes us write open-source is what makes us human: an animal that knows it's going to die.
</heavy philosophy>
It's almost like people who work tirelessly on their cars, on their homes, in their gardens, etc.
The popularity of stores that supply (and sometimes train) do-it-yourself'ers just shows how much work is being done out there for little or no pay. And don't forget all the house, auto, garden, food, etc, related TV shows too.
These people give a lot of their own time to create something cool for themselves.
Software has one added feature cars and houses do not. You can give away perfect copies of your work to your friends so they can enjoy it too.
There are many, many reasons to develop software. Sometimes there's something that Should Be There(tm), but isn't. Sometimes I feel like busting out a clever
hack to impress myself and friends. Sometimes it's fun to just tackle a random
challenge and see how well I can do with it. Sometimes someone's willing to pay me to write code for them.
I create for pleasure. If someone pays me, that's great. If not, what have I lost? Absolutely nothing; I spent a portion of my free time doing something I enjoy. The work is its own reward. The only reason I have a "day job" is so that I can fund my recreation.
I think the better question is:
Why do so many believe that financial profit is the only incentive to create?
--Blob
All sweeping generalizations suck.
Just as there are a myriad number of reasons why a person runs for office, a politician embodies a desire to help people. An open source programmer has the same instinct but expresses it by coding instead of politicing. Open source is a manifestation of altruism.
We do it because the man sucks. Every thing that we buy we have to choose from what the man makes. When shopping for a tv you chose one of the options at circuit city and pay money for it. It isn't practical to manufacture your own television just for yourself. You pick which one you like best.
With software you CAN make your own. And with the help of others on the internet you can make software that is perfect for yourself. It doesn't cost money either, just time. Not only that, but because it's just an arrangement of bits on a computer you can let the whole world have it for free. And in return you get the free software from the other open source folk.
The man gets no money, and your computer is just the way you like it. If you get open source software from someone else and it doesn't meet your needs, change it. Analogy: I got this tv for free, but the screen is too small, I spent an hour working on it and it is now 56".
Open source programming is just like the kibbutzes in Israel. They all live in one community and do a job for the good of the community. They get three meals a day, a house, everything because someone else in the community provides it. That person gets the service you provide for free and everyone elses.
We make open source software so we can get software that is perfect for us, and whoever else wants it. To save money, because the time we spend programming is worth less than the money we would spend. And we program open source software so that other people will follow suit and make free software for us.
The reason it hasn't been done before is that nothing else in the world has the nature of software. It's perfectly copyable infinite times for free. And it's free to change and create. Only costs time. To build a car you have to buy parts. To build software you use gcc.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I HOPE that for this meeting you have washed your hair, shaved, lost the ratty shorts and the faded t-shirt.
"Times may change, but standards must remain the same." - George Carlin.
(Disclaimer: I haven't released anything I've written as PD in about 7 or 8 years, and I have never released anything under licenses like GPL or BSD. But I'm not hostile to the idea; I just haven't been doing it.)
Some reasons I can think of for a developer wanting to release things this way:
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
My motivation for writing Open Source is to give back to the community that gave to me.
1) I am motivated to write a program because of a need I have (the old "I have an itch to scratch" adage)
2) I want to share it because I have benefitted so much from Open Source software.
So much of what I know came from exploring Linux and Apache. This knowledge has helped as much as my college education in getting the job I have today. Without the chance to "play" with all that free software as a college student, I really don't think I would be where I am now.
And the cathedral and the bazaar is too long and complicated for him to read.
Talk about a prototype and a fan club. Somebody somewhere makes a small simple demonstration of an idea, for the same reason stamp collectors catalog stamps and ships in bottles get built.
This prototype takes maybe an afternoon, maybe a week. Maybe a few months. It's some guy's hobby project, and they're proud of it.
Then they release it to friends, who find it interesting or useful, and pass it on to THEIR friends, until a fan club forms around it.
The fan club is full of people using it, admiring it, improving it. These are the same kind of people who put on star trek conventions and publish fanzines, and they can organize a LOT of effort when they try.
In the case of software, the prototype acquires new code like crystals around a condensation nuclei, (or amendments to a bill in congress). It's there, and people want one more feature, idea, color change, or bug fix, so they tweak their version and then submit their changes in to the fan club so it goes into the "official" version. (Which is official because the fan club is where the fans are.)
The central maintainer of the project (who may be the creator or the prototype, a designated successor, or just a group of senior fans in the fan club), acts like a goalie. Their job is to keep stuff OUT of the next release of the project. They can't make anybody submit stuff, but any fanzine has a slush pile of submitted poetry that's ten times what they can print. And the vast majority of it stinks. (Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud.)
So the editor's job is to veto stuff, accepting only the 2% or so that's worthy of going in to the project, which will really improve it, and which is worth the effort. (THAT is where a lot of the quality of open source comes from: the presence of ten competing implementations of any idea and the freedom to reject nine of them.)
This is how open source is organized. People write it for the same reason young children play with "star wars" action figures making up their own stories. They'll do it for weeks at a time, because it's what they consider FUN. You may not see it as fun, but the same could be said about stamp collecting, rock climbing, or golf.
Ask yourself why there are so many millions of web pages out there, mostly with pictures of people's cats? What does a search engine like Google do? Fight off sturgeon's law by finding the 1% that's interesting. This is what book publishers do wading through the slush pile, what music publishers do sorting through demo tapes of garage bands. There's a reason the first really successful internet business was Yahoo.
This is nothing new. The internet simply reduced the costs of doing business to the point where fan clubs (which have ALWAYS made superior stuff because they care, but which can't afford manufacturing facilities to make everyone a copy) can get their stuff out there where everyone can use it.
Rob
Remember history. The internet itself came about from software developed as free and open source by people who devoted their time and talents to something they gave away. Some examples include,
- The BSD tcp/ip stack
- Sendmail for email
- Bind for DNS
- NCSA httpd and browser for the www
- INN nntp for usenet
The benefits of open, free software like the above examples were immense both economically and socially for both businesses and individuals.
What would the internet look like today if the applications and protocols necessary had been developed as closed source and proprietary? The benefits to all of society, corporate and private, would have been far, far less.
Free, open source software that is being developed today by people who devote their time and talents to something they will give away will continue to benefit everyone into the future, just as the free open source software developed yesterday continues to benefit us all today. Isn't that reason enough? Isn't that a worthy tradition to uphold?
The BSD TCP/IP stack, whose development was funded by DARPA, is a good example. It led directly to the development of the Internet -- including Slashdot. If companies had been prevented from incorporating that network stack into their own products (and they would have, if the software had been GPLed), we simply would not have had an Internet today. Likewise, we would not have a World Wide Web were it not for truly free software such as NCSA Mosaic.
GPLed software is -- as the FSF itself says -- not open source. And it violates the Open Source Definition, since it discriminates against a group of people (commercial programmers) and a field of endeavor (the creation of commercial software). It is also viral. For these reasons, it is important that those approaching Congressman Boucher advocate truly free software (such as Apache) and not GPLed software. Otherwise, government money will be paying for software which is licensed in an un-free and discriminatory manner, and this would not be good.
Brett Glass
I enjoy writing code because it is, in many ways, a professional implementation of building a better mousetrap. The emphasis is on making something that performs a task better, faster, more reliably, and credit is given for ingenuity and resourcefulness. I find this appealing. Moreover, unlike most things, software design (or at least algorithm design) takes place almost entirely in mindspace, and as such provides nearly endless possibilities for intriguing mental exercises. I find immense reward in coming up with an elegant solution to a problem.
Aside from the coding aspect, there are practical concerns that make open source attractive. Chief among these, in my opinion, is the fact that if it isn't the way I want it, I can fix it. To draw a relatively poor analogy, I once took a file to a plastic TV set case so it would clear a hinge in the cabinet in which I wanted to put it. With open source software, I can file the case; if Microsoft Office doesn't fit in the "cabinet" in which I wish to put it, I am out of luck. Worse, if I want it and it doesn't work on my system, I am completely out of luck; if it is open source and I am up to it, I can port it on my own. There's an issue of self-sufficiency and independence here.
Finally, I am loathe to give control in my life to someone else. Using proprietary software does this. What if Microsoft stops supporting a product? What if they reduce backwards compatibility (Office 95->Office 98 is still causing me headaches when I pass documents around)? With open source such a scenario is unlikely; anyone who was to make such a move would quickly be stopped by a community effort that would negate all effects of the action. Consider, for example, if the StarOffice 6 were not compatible with 5.2--how long would that last?
There are many appealing things about open source, and I think that's reflected in its rapid growth. Were I you, I would also point out that open source will never replace proprietary software so much as augment it. I don't view the open source movement as an anti-corporate leftist group so much as a group of often like-minded developers who recognize the inherent advantages of the open model in many applications. If we can make our legislators at least conversant in the right areas, I think the cause of open source will be greatly advanced.
-db
I am sure there are many reasons why people work on an open source project but I believe the fundamental motivator is the "Need to Create or Self-Actualize".
:))
I think it was Maslow who indentified 5 basic human needs and arranged them in a hierarcy or pyramid which are (remembering for psych-101)
1 Basic Needs (food, water, shelter)
2. Need for Security and stability
3. Need for a Sense of Belonging (family, gang, Open source project
4. Need for love and esteem.
5. Need to Self-Actualization.
When the lower need is satified then individual are motivated by the next level. I would suspect that most Open Source contributors are motivated by undescribable need to Self-Actualize and create, and maybe to a lesser degree to achieve Esteem within a peer group.
Why do people do anything?
Why do people serve on school boards, PTAs, volunteer at the local hospita or do ANY
THING without compensation?
Simple logic tells us "because they derive some form of satisfaction from doing what ever it is we're talking about."
As a society I don't believe that we emphasize contribution to society nearly enough (volunteering, helping fellow citizens on a regular basis, observing social customs which allow for society to function, participating in our government, respecting others). A healthy democracy only survives when people act together to make their world, community, neighborhood and life better. Civil society is what has made our great country (USA) great. Civic particpation is on the decline, though. I don't have the answers as to why this is the case, but I know that we strongly value the individual. We hold individualism on such a high pedastal, that we forget that we individuals live with many other individuals - in a society. Forgetting that we're "all in this together" leads to many factions claiming autonomy from the rest of everybody; lead
ing to deadlock in government and tension/hate between social groups.
To return to the question at hand, I don't understand why the open source community needs to justify itself to Congressman Boucher. Every individual contributes to the open source movement for his or her own reasons. I would be surprised if there were one common crisply defined motivation behind every open source developer, tester and user.
Plus, I don't like the tone of the question. To me, it sounded as if the Congressman was saying "Why the hell are all you fools doing this work without pay or other tangible recompense?" It's as if he was challenging the very notion of volunteering time and contributing to some larger good. It seems like the Congressman (and society)
have taken a purely rational being straight out of an intro economics text and made it our model individual. As a society, we can not afford such rational citizens. Self interest and the unwillingness to contribute to anything except ourselves is tearing our country apart; just read the news someday.
I can't believe I haven't seen this reason yet, and to those of you who think it isn't at least a partial factor in your own contributions, think about it carefully.
The reason I'm speaking of is to get your name known, be popular, get famous, etc. Whatever you choose to call it, alot of us have a desire to be known for doing something, to have our name mean something to somebody. It makes us feel more connected to the world to know that we are known and liked by others, even if we'll never see or talk to those people.
Yes of course people are genuinely philanthropic with their time, didn't mean to suggest otherwise, but please don't deny that fame isn't a factor also. It makes the whole thing sound more believable to an intelligent politician like Boucher who is apparently trying to understand the motives and drives behind the movement.
Programming is creative art. I love it. To make money with software in a traditional business model I would have to do paperwork, like getting lawyers to write intimidating licenses, doing financial administration and deal with all kinds of dirty tax issues. All extremely boring ugly things that would spoil the joy of creating something nice. In the Open Source model I (the developer) am not harmed by those.
Disclaimer: I am not yet an open source developer, in the sense that I wrote a program and submitted it to freshmeat/sourceforge or so. You may call me a wannabee. First I have to finish my &*^%$ thesis, when that's done I'll plunge into one or a few project and/or start one myself. Well, I have some already, and a herd of ideas, but I would not dare yet to show it to others. I submit bugreports and comments to the work of others, by way of passive contribution to the OSS world.
Why do painter's paint?
Donations to the library, homeless, Goodwill, Salvation Army. Lions Club, Shriners, Parks Department, Adopt-A-Highway. Jerry Lewis, cancer research, museums, astronomy club telescope viewings. Boston tea party, American revolution.
Why _do_ people try to make the world a better place?
Did your congressman not know about any of these things?
Did he think you didn't?
the same reason a dog licks his nuts. Because I can. About the software that is.
Some people build model airplanes, some people fix up old cars, and some people write software. Some people don't see it as work, they enjoy it...just like any other hobbiest.
Because it looks damned good on a resume. Maskirovka
Hokie Hokie Hokie Hi, Tech Tech VPI, Sola-Rex, Sola-Rah, Polytech VIRGINIA!!
GO HOKIES!!!!
That would make sense if you actually had to buy any software with a new PC. The fact is they throw in tons of stuff so most people can do something when they turn it on. Word processing, burning CDs, games, slideshows, graphics programs... I recently bought a Sony VAIO for $600 that had all that stuff loaded up, included in the cost. That's what the bloody anti-trust suit is about, that MS gives you things free to wipe out their competitors. The reason the gov had such a hard time selling it was precisely because it was really hard to demonstrate harm to the consumer.
Oh, and by the way the prices of PCs are so low that compared to a few years ago you could buy $2k of software before you got anywhere near the purchase price of the hardware.
What you're saying is you're not willing to pay the programmers that do all this nice work for your lame ass to use.
There are lots of great reasons to use Linux, but I'm afraid the "free beer" part is (usually) much less important than the "free speech" part. When MS ups the ante to the point where it really hurts people THEN we'll see a more serious migration (especially in corporate settings) to Linux.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
One line: I love to program. I have a programming job right now, but haven't been doing as much programming, so I voluntarily took on a second "job" and spent an extra 60 hours over a week and a half doing real programming, because I love it.
I'm a programmer, and writing software is what I do. If I need a tool for something, I'll go and find it, if it doesn't exist, I'll write it, if it is moderately useful, I'd release it to the world, and using an existing license (like the GPL) is an easy way to do that.
As others have said, programming is like many other skills: Cooking, gardening, woodworking, carpentry, knitting... Why do we do any of these in our spare time? And why do people share ideas, techniques, plans, tools with others? Because they enjoy the task, and enjoy the interaction with others, enjoy the rewards of being 'known' for the skill.
Software is somewhat different from other practices, since all you need is a computer and tools (nearly all of which you can find for free) and you can do anything. It is different from some things like gardening where you are dependent on the weather, season, money for plants, and lots of time, or things like woodworking, where you may share tools with neighbors, but you certainly won't lend a circular saw to a friend in CA if you are in NY!
It isn't that writing software is so different, but it IS based on different economics, which enhances certain aspects and minimizes others...
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
Only a small fraction of software has ever been written to become finished products sitting on a store shelf. Most software is written for custom applications or single use, or for use within an organization. There has never been a reason to protect this type of software and it has generally been freely shared.
Open source is simply a formalization of this situation, a mechanism by which efforts expended towards producing this type of non-product software can be pooled and shared to save expense and effort.
It is exactly analogous to the way scholars have always published their findings in journals for all to read. Why don't they hoard all that knowledge for themselves? Because the overall result would be much slower progress for everyone.
Simply put some ppl get more of a thrill getting respect and props from intellectual equals than they do money. Why do college professors agree to give all thier IP to the college, because they just might discover something that may propel them into the intellectual circles and the prestige that goes with it. And for the LOVE of it. I write video games because it brings ppl pleasure. That the only reason.
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
i think that people have a drive to be creative because in creating, we are adding diversity to the universe, which seems to be the purpose of it all. but we want others to acknowledge and use our creation, we want props, we want chicks. and so the way you get people to use it, besides offering innovation, is to give it to people for less than the cost of others or the ultimate undercut, for free. that's simple market competition. i think that most of us who love to make software realize that money is just something we gather to get by, but what is most important in the grand scheme of things is making something that people will use and enjoy so your name will be remembered forever =) besides it'll just get pirated if you try and charge for it anyways =P
(=MintyGreenCow=) [grammar? punctuation?]
Explain to him that the GPL is a virus. Once you use something GPLed you are required by law to GPL everything you ever write from then on, as well as your children, and your children's children, to 7 generations.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
We seem to be missing a central point: software is not like a car or a shoe or a pencil. Material things cost resources, and therefore money, for every unit produced. Software can be copied forever at virtually no cost, so our hobby can benefit more people at no cost to us. Producing software as a hobby, and not making it free, would be illogical.
To cite an earlier example, someone who likes baking might produce a pan of muffins to share with friends. But imagine if posting a muffin to the internet meant anyone who wanted could try one at no cost. Wouldn't every hobbyist baker "give away" their creations for free?
There are many good reasons sent in so far, but this one has been missed. Many commercial entities willingly share mutually beneficial actions for free. The classic example is the free sidewalk clearing. If each store owner clears their portion of the sidewalk, all benefit. It is silly to charge a fee.
Much of the bug fixing and feature enhancement falls into this category. We each fix our own and cooperate in developing the features that meet our needs. It is simpler and cheaper to just share these for free instead of wasting lots of money on lawyers.
This is also why the wars over licenses (like GPL) get so vehement. It is things like the GPL that keep this sharing of effort from benefitting the parasites. Local merchants associations get vehement about stores that don't take care of their portion of the sidewalk (e.g. freeloaders). Software developers care about the license to deal with freeloaders.
When you're writing code, there are times when you get to an impass, or whatnot. It's nice to get the input from thousands of helpful people all over the world.
:), we could use all the creative talents of humanity and really do some cool shit.
:)
I think the input of all these different viewpoints can only help out the advancement of technology. Instead of closely guarding your "proprietary information", you ask for input and refinements from others... which in turn just keeps making the product better..
It just stands to reason that the more people you have looking at something, each from their own viewpoint, the more solutions you can come up with.
If we could somehow get past the monetary society that we have (and no, I have no idea as to how that is possible
Like someone else said, because you want to help out, to leave something behind, and to foster progess... and it makes you feel good to know that you contributed to something that can benefit others..
okay, i'm done now. that sounded a lot less cheesy in my head
Place sig here.
That's a great answer to the question, and you could extend it like this:
"You know how some people just enjoy building model trains in their basement? Imagine what they would do if they could share their models... or link their tracks to others' tracks, in other basements. Imagine the excitement they'd have and how perfect they'd want their model to be. You'd almost certainly have configurations that would rival the original engineering decisions that go into building actual train yards, wouldn't you? Just like that, the net enabled a lot of model builders - i.e., people who enjoy programming - to share their models with every other model builder in the WORLD. So it's not surprising they built some amazing things, including the most stable large-scale operating system and the world's most-used web server."
I think people would instinctively understand an analogy like that, and it makes for great advocacy.
I write software because I need it.
And I make it free because it's the best way for software to envolve. The more people using/coding/hacking/patching/reporting bugs/sending ideas, the better.
That's how free software works.
It's not for autruism or anything. I just want it to work. If there is already a software that does what I want, I'll just use it. If it is commercial, I just get a "pirate" copy. I care zero about "stealing" software.
Also, I agree 100% with the "why do people paint?" post.
As Sir Isaac Newton said "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."
Software is as much art as discovery. Software is an algorithm, or series of algorithms, most of which are the result of another's work. It gets back to the root of Copyright where its hard to say "This is mine and I want compensation" when most of your program, if it were a book or painting, would land you a fine for plagarism. By taking the work that others have given to the public domain (or, in the case of mathematical formulas, aren't protected under law), and releasing it to the public, you also benefit from the improvements when someone stands atop your shoulders and looks beyond the next horizon.
And sometimes, it just feels good to give. One should strive to make the world a better place, and presumeably, Open Source programmers program for free because they enjoy programming. It's like performing a concert for charity - fame, recognition, and it's something you'd be doing alone and anonymously in a garage with your friends anyway. And at next year's concert, the hot new band on the stage maybe lists you as an influence before their first set.
I'm never going to win a nobel prize or get into some sports hall of fame, but maybe if the software I write is good anough and scratches a big enough itch...
Why do is there open-source software (OSS)? That's easy: the same reason anyone does anything else, rational self-interest.
If I have a piece of OSS, and it doesn't do what I need, I change it, or pay someone else to change it. If I improve the program, it makes my life easier. For that single outlay of labor, I have daily benefit. So there is plenty of incentive for me to tinker with open-source software. That's why most people who write OSS also use it!
Then I can pass my changes along at almost zero cost, and by scratching once I've cured both my itch and maybe the itch of many other people. To put it in economic terms, OSS is a public good with no "free-rider" problem!
You see, someone asks why open-source programmers "give away" their software, they are falling into a trap that the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft have set. You can't "give away" an intangible thing. You can duplicate it so that someone else has a copy. The writer still has what they are giving away, and they still hold the authorship rights.
Of course, one might ask, why pass along the changes? Why not charge for them? Why not hoard them, and dole them out for a fee, even if it would probably be much easier for to just email them to the author or post them on a web site? Well, for one thing, many of my changes might be relatively small, or my program might have limited functionality and I'm hoping someone else will flesh it out. Nobody would be willing to pay just for that. Whatever price I charge for it, someone can come along and do it cheaper. So I might as well pass it along in the hopes that someone will improve it further and then I can benefit from that. Besides, software is often like math: once you find the solution to a programming problem, that's it, there's no need to have everyone re-invent the same thing.
You might also ask, where does the big innovation happen? It seems like OSS produces just incremental evolution, just enought to get our jobs done, not revolutions that change the way we live. My answer to that is, where does it happen now? All the big software companies have been making software the same way for years. Microsoft's best innovation was the licensing scheme they used when they started selling their OS pre-installed on computers. One big innovation was the internet, but that was initially paid for with public funds. I think the big innovation can happen anywhere, at any time, in a proprietary software company's labs, or a students bedroom. But for the small incremental innovation, nothing will beat OSS.
OSS is just an example of a free market: software is priced based on the marginal cost of zero. The software monopolies you see around you are flawed free markets.
There is another less utilitarian but vitally important reason for OSS software which, namely Freedom. I would like to live in a world someday where I can buy a computer and not have to buy a certain company's operating system, whether I want it or not, or at least be able to sell the operating system if I don't want to use it. Just like I like to buy a car, and then sell the tires to replace them, or choose the brand of gasoline, or the garage I keep it in, or the mechanic who works on it, without violating a license agreement. I like to have the freedom to alter and share my programs, and the freedom to be paid for this service. We have many freedoms like this with our houses, televisions, food, etc, but not with our software.
It seems companies have needlessly implanted their proprietary software with the drawbacks of physical things: only one copy can exist at a time, only one person can use it at a time. And they've also taken away some of the freedoms we enjoy with physical things: the freedom to take it apart, the freedom to change it, sometimes even the freedom to sell it to someone else. We lose on both counts.
People like Freedom, they will fight for it, whether it's obvious like freedom of speech, or subtle like software freedom. OSS is a very easy and legal way to fight for this freedom, and to get around what many people feel is a very flawed system of copyright law.
1). Microsoft has such a strong position in the market that people have an irrational fear of using anything else. If I wrote a word processor that was demonstrably better than MS Word I'd have trouble GIVING it away, let alone selling it.
2). Software is easy to copy. Even if I write really good software and sell it cheap, not everyone will buy a legal copy.
3). Software can easily be written by one person working on his kitchen table. Selling software requires a LOT more resources, including employees who will insist on being paid whether the company makes any money or not.
4). If I sell software I am morally obligated to stand behind it to some extent, to provide support. Giving away software with source means that anyone who gets my software can solve his own problems. I can refuse to be liable for what my software does with a clean conscience.
5). If I give my software away with source code I don't get any money for the software. However, I don't lose money either. (http://sourceforge.net provides a method of distributing my software to anyone that wants it without cost to me.) Maybe I can gain a reputation for writing good code or designing good systems that may help me find work. There is plenty of work writing custom software and that is a surer way of making money than running a software business.
6). Since everyone who uses my program gets my source code, some of them may be motivated to find and fix bugs, add features to my project, etc., all at no cost to me. This has in fact already happened on my own project.
7). I don't have to give anyone guilt trips about paying for my work and not sharing it with their friends. I WANT them to share with their friends! The more the better!
8). Finally, I can benefit by the code and programs of others. If someone else's program has a feature that would also be useful in my own, I can use his code as is or try to improve on it.
Contrast this with Microsoft's business model, which is to convince people to buy basically the same products over and over again every few years, when the products they bought the last time still work and will NEVER wear out? When the new products require a new computer to run? It is amazing they are still in business!
However, I think the most people produce software simply for their own use. That is, we want to have the software to accomplish some task and there's no efficient way of getting it other than to write it ourselves, so we write it. Then, we give it away because there's no particular reason to keep it. If the primary value of a program is derived from the use you get out of it, and the potential commercial value of most software is small, then giving it away doesn't reduce the value of the software at all. Indeed, since others are encouraged to enhance the software and release their enhancements, the value of the software to you may actually increase if you share it.
I'm not out to change the world and I believe that intellectual property is as real as any other kind. I think that copyrights, trademarks, and even patents have boosted innovation and commerce for centuries so I see no reason to do away with them. Further, I have no products to sell on my own and my funding for these things comes out of my own pocket, but I was taught that it is polite to be neighborly and to share what you have with those around you. That is sufficient justification, in and of itself, for me to share the software that I write for myself. The fact that it has sometimes come back to me significantly enhanced is just icing on the cake.
...would otherwise *not* do Open Source.
1. There is an OSS solution that needs just a little bit more push to fulfill my needs. The biggest example of this for me was Gifsicle. All it needed was a Win32 build and a couple of minor bugfixes. The cost of supplying those things was far exceeded by the cost of re-writing it from scratch, and there were no cheap alternatives that did the same thing.
2. To demonstrate programming skill. Obviously the only way to show people your skill is to show them your code. As long as you are going to show them the code, you might as well make sure that you can still use it in the future (not under an NDA) and most OSS licenses fulfill that need which brings us to...
3. To avoid being tied down to one employer. The more you work with OSS, and the more popular it is, the less you are tied to your employer. If all your work is in-house or NDA, the employer has a tremendous power over you. Get layed off and you may have to develop a whole new set of skills. In this regard, OSS acts as a kind of informal labor union with all the associated inefficencies. Developers who really want to break free are better off figuring out a way to own their IP, but many see that as too difficult so OSS gives them entry into a kind of "guild" that can convey certain advantages as described above.
4. The classic reason, which is that you enjoy it. Personally, I find that this only holds true when there is a small ammount of effort, perhaps a single night's work. I have a hard time imagining this drive becoming so powerful that I would be moved to make signficant contributions to something as arcane as kernel code without financial compensation.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
is for fucking faggots, we already know this. this means they do it for the big dick in their fat hairy ass. wow.
Because:
...
1) I wanted to repay Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds and
all the other Free Software writers for giving me a cheap/free
Unix with all the tools and ESPECIALLY THE COMPILER.
2) I write numerical software(Finite Element Analysis) and
am dependent on the fact that numerical techniques such as
Gauss Quadrature, LU decomposition, the Method of Conjugate Gradients,
Lanczos Method of tridiagonalizing a matrix, and the QR algorithm,
are all open and free for me to use. Scientific computing would
be dead if these techniques were closed off due to patents or
hidden in the proprietary code of some company.
3) Companies ask programmers and engineers to sign non-disclosure
agreements(NDA). With Free Software I can:
a) Create a body of work before becoming employed which
I can take anywhere that will override the unfair parts of a
broadly drawn NDA. Releasing it as Free Software makes
it public.
b) Other programmers can do the same. If they add to the work
can say they are legally bound( at least by the GPL) to
contribute back to the code and therefore, will be able to
have these contributions go with them to their next job.
4) Keeping things secret and closed is self-defeating, especially in
science. I say this from personal experience of working in
academia. Anyone who does science knows that even under the best
circumstances where one has access to every equation, journal,
expert in the field, etc. it is still a very difficult process. Let's
not make it worse by hiding source.
And on and on
San Le www.slffea.com
that I put in time helping build houses with Habitat for Humanity. There are people who need problems solved and don't have the skill or time or money to buy the software to do it themselves. If it's a problem that I need solved as well, then I can help them with very little effort on my own part.
ESR and others have observed that most really successful OS projects bloom out of the author's own needs, and he decides to share the solution, either out of generosity or ego gratification or both. Either way, everyone benefits.
I like to program. It makes me feel creative. I like to figure things out, to make things work, to wrap my mind around the beautifully pure, abstract logic of a machine.
Plus, I like the sense of community that working on an open source project gives you. I've made friends with people I never would have met otherwise. Even if you aren't actively coding for a project, just giving feedback, asking/answering questions...just being a part of it somehow is very satisfying.
I am periodically amazed by what has been accomplished in the name of free/open software. When else in the history of the world have so many people, from so many different backgrounds, worked together to make something so complex, so beautiful, and so useful? It's terribly exciting, if you think about it.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
for the same reason you'd share your water with your friend when you were stranded in the desert.
because writing code over and over again is repetetively redundant.
because helping people is a better then money.
if you do it, somebody else will too...
because sometimes you need more people to work out the bugs.
and Finally Why Not?
Why. Why Not?
DoubleU
0o.o0.o0o.
After quickly scanning everyone's reasons for writing open source code, I discovered that all of you seem to be missing one reason: the money. If I'm remembering correctly;), there are quite a few open source companies out there that re-package various distributions with helpfull additions, plus offer fee based support. And some of these companies make quite a lot of money.
While Ego, the challenge of doing it, the desire to the help the community, etc.. are all fine and noble goals, don't forget: you can make a living designing and writing software whose code is open source.
To those of you who think that altruistic or ego based motives are the only "real" reasons for getting into open source, please hold those inside. I'm guessing that a lot of programmers and companies shy away from open source because of those opinions.
"The only way to get the general populous and businesses to use open source is to provide a product that outperforms, has more features, and is more stable than the competitions." While that idea is true, its missing some crucial elements, namely, marketing and market anticipation.
Money comes into effect when your asked to meet customer demand. Microsoft does this all the time for large corporations, often times anticipating (or creating) market need. By generating revenue, an open source company can compete with the marketing strategies that commercial software firms use.
Ask him a series of smart rhetorical questions and lead him to his own answer. That is the best way to get these smartie-pantses in our government to realize exactly what is going on; make them figure it out for themselves, but with a good helping hand. It's just like back in high school when you had that pain-in-the-ass teacher who would ask you a lot of rhetorical questions to try to get you to think about a topic in a certain way. That still works out here in the real world, and it happens to be a key tool lawyers and politicians use when discussing or debating a topic.
The fact is that almost everyone with any sort of free time has a hobby. ("Hobby" being defined as an activity that one does in their spare time which does not achieve remuneration for the action.) That hobby might be tending a garden, or watching television, or playing the cello, or having sex, or cataloging astronomical objects in the sky. This also means that there could be people who dedicate their spare time to writing computer programs and helping others to write programs or use their computers better.
Asking a hacker why she gives away her code is like asking a nun why she feeds the poor and gives charity. It's the belief that you're hopefully helping to make the world better and the knowledge that you will be remembered, at least in some small way, for your efforts in time to come. In even more simplistic terms, it's a warm fuzzy combined with an ego stroking. You just can't beat that feeling; even chasing money never feels that good. (Having tried both, I choose the warm fuzzy and ego stroke.)
I started writing Exult
Some of the code I write is closed source (cries of 'heresy' can be heard). I do it because my employer pays me to do it.
Some of the code I write is open source. I do it because I want to. I don't need to get paid for it, since I get paid for my other software. I'm just doing it mostly for fun, and a little for the educational experience and practice. Absent the need for payment, I made it freeware. The benefits accrued to both the user and myself by making it open source freeware far outweighs the benefits from closed source freeware.
Make no mistake, I consider my open source software to be freeware. That's because that is what it is: free beer. I do not charge for downloading it. And I do not forbid anyone from distributing it free of charge once they obtain it.
I'm not making my stuff open source out of some sense of duty, or because I think I am supposed to, or because it is politically correct, or becauseI think it will save the world from destruction, or that I will go to hell if I don't. I do it because I want to. It's an ego boost, an itch scratcher, and a thank you note, all rolled up into one.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Are you saying:
Not having the choice to reuse existing software, benefits you always because it forces you to fully understand the problem before re-implementing the solution?
If anything, haveing a peek at someone else's solution could be helpful
Your stance is exceptionally pro-Microsoft. In fact more extremem than their view. But anyways, how does MS prevent terrorists and spies from using Office?
Using open source software makes sense from the business perspective. It usually offers a zero cost entry into technology.
Say, I want to use a J2EE application server. I start with the open source versions get familiar with the technology, etc. If my needs outgrow the free software, I can buy the commercial one. All the knowledge I gathered is kept.
If I find bugs, I send them back. Not because I'm altruist. It's because I'm lazy and I don't want to redo that fix each time I install a new version of the software (open source usually has frequent releases). By giving back fixes, I make sure the fixes stay.
If the software we write isn't core to my company. Releasing it to open source gives us visibility, and potentially more volunteers to help work on problems that are important for the business. We might even find a very talented programmer and hire him.
Another big case for Open Source is the feeling that something is wrong when you have to buy something as trivial as a word processor or other similar software. They have been around for 15 years without much in terms of real improvements. Why would a business pay 200$ per seat for that ? (yeah discount available if you 10000 people working for you... we don't). The worst is that we have to buy the latest version of those software becuase otherwise we can't read what clients are sending us...
I hope this helps.
Suppose I wrote a killer app. How would I sell it? I'm just one guy with a full-time job and no selling skills. Maybe I could convince 5 of my friends to plunk down the green stuff. Then I'd have 5 guys hounding me, asking why it didn't work right, wanting me to add this, that, or the other kewl new feature. If I include the source code, I can tell them to make their own damn fixes/enhancements. And if they like it and give it to a bunch of their buddies, it won't line my pockets, but I can say "look at all those people using MY program!"
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Keeping in mind you'll be talking to a politician, who's probably a capitalist, answers like for fun are still going to leave them wondering. This has been and will continue to be a root issue for the Open Source movement: justification of a free service as a business model in a capitalist society - or how the heck do you plug a worthy square peg (Open Source) into a round hole (Modern Economic Theory - which sometimes runs 200 years back or more) which seems to be unable to shift paradigms and mature.
... whether it will ...
This is not a technology question, this is a fundamental business issue which is best answered by the tech community that propagates OpenSource (cf work by others on this btw, none of which I can currently quote of the top of my head).
Without a common basis to look out from, anyone who's not a geek is not going to understand why we do Open Source. What that common basis is and how to get there I leave for those brighter than me.
In order for OpenSource to grow to more than a niche Economic Theory & Practices need to make a radical - overdue - paradigm shift. How do you evaluate and place a fair market value (think like a capitalist now) on a service or product that's given away freely? Or, can that square peg become more circular in shape. But how?
Maybe I'll get tired of waiting for the bean counters to figure that out, go back to school for an MBA and come up with a solution in my copious spare time.
On the other side of the coin, as a disguntruled, unemployed geek burned twice by dunderheaded business processes (and I've played executive roles as well), I'm going to give my work away for free now? To the community, yes, certainly not to the commercial sector, unless I'm going to get a free mortgage out of the deal somehow.
OpenSource - it's worthy, we all love, it can work
be0wulfe
ask one of those out of work artists why they continue to write/paint/act or whatever in conjunction with their waiting job: because they love to do it.
Everyone here is talking about a sense of responsibility, a desire to give-back. I think that's all an exaggeration: the people making great free software are writing software because they LOVE to make software. Coding is fun, creative, and challenging. You never stop learning and improving at it and you never stop loving that first time you run a program after compiling out a bug, and then testing it and seeing that it works.
I think that's the difference between OS programmers and the people who get payed wads of cash everyday to write proprietary code: OS/free programmers are artists, and they can't stop creating.
The fact that the product is often practical doesn't change anything.
We don't give it away, the funny thing with software is, if you make a copy for someone else, you don't have suffer for it in any way.
And if you give it to a lot of people, a fair chance is, someone will get an idea and make your little project bigger and better.
That's one of many reasons.
New things are always on the horizon
2. Because there is a good deal of satisfaction in knowing that your work is being used by people.
3. General ego gratification of the "I'm smart enough to do this" form. This is the main reason there is very high quality in Open Source software, the other reasons I state do not give any incentive for high quality.
Why did Van Gogh paint?
Why did Shakespeare write?
Why did Rodin sculpt?
Of course people need to put food on the table and would like fame and fortune, but many artists have the urge to create, and programmers are no different.
Just as some painters are "merely" practicing a craft (e.g., painting a house), so also some coders are merely practicing a craft (cranking out code for project X). But there are those people who simply must create. This should not be underestimated as a motivational force, and is an important component of a free and open society.
I started writing Exult about three years ago, mainly just to get a little experience writing with XLib. At the time, my job involved writing a couple HDL compilers for my employer (a large Dutch company). Around the time the compilers were being beta-tested, my group was sold to another company, and my project shelved.
Then I worked for a startup, also developing compilers. I left after about a year, just before they ran out of money (whew!). What I wrote for them will probably never see the light of a CRT again.
Meanwhile, Exult has grown to over 100K lines-of-code, has about a half-dozen active developers, a busy user forum, and gets 8-10K downloads when we release each alpha. We've also received at-a-boy emails from several of Ultima7's developers, and even one from R.G himself (unless someone was spoofing:-)).
I still need to keep coding for money, but the GPL'd code has certainly brought me a lot more satisfaction.
I run a small custom software development company. We develop web applications tailored for our clients' businesses. Our clients tend to be small businesses who make a fair margin providing products and/or services to their customers. Their primary motivation for hiring us to develop web applications is to achieve some ROI by cutting costs associated with business processes by automating them. This allows them to scale their offerings better. These business processes range from internal data entry and reporting systems to high volume public web sites.
In our scenario, there are a number of reasons why using and developing free software makes sense:
1. Predictability: Free software is much more transparent and malleable than software that cannot be modified by the purchaser. This permits a software engineering organization to understand and mold the 'building materials' to fit the software development process. By understanding and being able to tune the composition and behavior of software components, one can develop reliable metrics for cost and time prediction.
Because our customers are usually not flush with cash, budget and timing can make or break a project. Our ability to meet our estimates is one of our key competetive aspects. The achilles heel of non-free software is the 'suprise factor', or the point in the project where you run across an bug or an invalid assumption. Lack of malleability causes you to have to build a 'workaround', which may have a ripple effect on the rest of the architecture, and may blow your budget as a result.
In summary, free software is much more predictable than non-free software due to its transparency and malleability, and thus is a preferred choice when faced with tight budgets and schedules.
2. Price: Not having to pay license fees as business expands and usage increases is a clear bonus here. Not having to manage license fees is a considerable factor, due to the potentially massive cost and legal implications of non-compliance.
In some cases, prices for well known commercially distributed application servers are higher that what we charge to build an entire application, and in our experience don't meet our requirements regarding performance, reliability and development tool support that we need for our projects.
3. Ease of distribution: We install our GPL framework and custom applications built on top of it to customers by checking it a single set of files from a CVS (revision control system) account onto each piece of hardware they need it on. Separately installing and managing dozens of proprietary components on each target machine in order to deploy an application would present a point of cost, complexity and potential for human error, yet this is usually a required step when using non-free software due to licenses which restrict copying.
4. Vendor goals misaligned: The business model of proprietary software comes with an incentive to seek the largest possible target market for products. Vendors do not build products for the handful of experts in a given area, they build them for the masses of novices and average users because they are easier to satify and represent a larger market segment.
In addition many commercial product vendors polish the upper, visible layers of their products and ensure that 'common' use patterns work well. This means that these products will serve the average user, but any underlying architectural deficiencies won't be uncovered until the point they become a problem, usually in the latter phases of a project, which is the -worst- time to discover a problem.
As an expert in my field, I ultimately demand a high level of quality in my tools, even if I have to improve them myself to get them to the level of quality I require. If use a tool from a non-free software vendor and it doesn't meet my standards of quality, I have no option but to toss it out and start over with a different tool. Coupled with the fact that I cannot inspect the architecture of the tool before I commit to using it, my logical conclusion is that most commercial software represents an uncontrollable project risk. Some people can live with that, if they have a lot of cash to burn, but my customers won't fund that kind of risk.
Often, people make the mistake of associating well marketed brand names and high product cost with a reduced level of project risk. I have not found any justification for such a correlation. The source of the risk is ultimately a lack of visibility with regards to product architecture, a lack of understanding of the vendors primary target market (usually due to vendors not wanting to exclude -anyone- as a potential customer), and a lack of ability to fix bugs promptly.
5. Selective use of others work: With free software, one can gain the benefits of using existing code at a granular level. With non-free software, this choice is not so granular- you end up having to use much more of a third party product than you may need or want to simply because the product can not be de-integrated by the purchaser.
In summary, using free software is critical for my business developing custom solutions for customers. I get paid in proportion to my costs developing these solutions, and make a fair profit. My business is sustainable and relatively predictable due to the level of control I have over my toolbase and development process. This level of control necessitates the use of free software, but free software alone is not sufficent- I have put a tremendous amount of work into my own GPL'd tools and into the integration with third party GPL tools, as well as commercial products where they can be tolerated.
Once these preconditions are satisfied, assuming I haven't already assigned myself to too many projects, I start an open-source project because I know that I will be able to attract like-minded people. They have the same itch, perhaps varying levels of talent, and the same inspiration. I would most likely not start a project if I knew it wouldn't attract others. The fact that I am sure others will join the project for the same reasons lets me know a priori that the project will have some success.
If the project can attract enough talent, the project can easily end up outclassing the commercial equivalent, because generally commercial projects are not worked on by people with inspiration. Their main motivation is the paycheck, or the experience, but almost never to scratch the itch, and almost never dreams of riches.
The people who work on an open-source project don't consider it work. Work is what you do because you have to. Work is what you do as little of to gain as much return as possible. Open-source programming is *play*. Thus, if I considered programming as work, I would never work on an open-source project. Thus, "programming as play" could be a pre-precondition.
Finally, even if I had the itch, the talent, and the inspiration, I most likely would not start a commercial project because that wouldn't "pay anything forwards". I can make an open-source project more successful by leveraging off of existing open-source projects, which I couldn't do (easily or ethically) with a commercial project. Thus, the fact that open-source exists is itself a pre-precondition.
--Robert Baruch
The company I work for is about to open source several very useful java packages. (Licence TBD). Why? We are a consulting company, NOT a product company. We have tried before, and it is nearly impossible for us to make money selling products. We don't have the support staff for all the packaging, shipping, phone calls, etc.
BUT, by open-sourcing our code, we look like 'experts' in that area, which can lead to more consulting work. People will see our stuff and say, "These guys have written exactgly what we need! Lets hire them to show us how to use it." As a result, our consulting work goes up.
Doctors don't make money by charging you for the tongue depressers they use at your visit... They make money by charging for their time. Same for lawyers, architects, etc. Intelligence is the currency of this kingdom... not shrink-wrapped widgets.
Open Source is a hobby with most people. They are very serious about their hobby. They are the same type of guys/gals that grow prize roses, build hotrods that cost a ton, race in the Sportsman class, build ships in bottles, etc.
They don't do it for money, they do it for geek points, fun, to pass the time, whatever. Tell the Congressman to haul his head out and check with the real world once in a while. Hobby produced work almost always equals or exceeds "professional" work in quality and attention to detail at the highest levels.
Open Source, Free software etc. will usually surpass the commercial (M$) version because tons of people are going through it by hand in search of the perfect code, each one trying to do better than the last guy. No company can purchase that kind of dedication.
I give away some software I've written because of simple economics: the cost of one or two or even 100 transactions is just too high. I'm not set up to charge people $150 for a SPARC assembler: I don't have a tax ID, I don't want a tax ID, I don't even want to know about taxes, I can't accept credit cards. The cost of getting set up to make the transaction would be too high. I could never recoup it.
Very specialized software for certain tasks will never have very many buyers. The cost of the few transactions will always put that software in some grey area where the writer may as well give it away.
This seems like an argument for micropayments, doesn't it?
is that selling the software would involve considerable effort, investment, and risk. Especially if some expectation of success is included.
Releasing can provide rewards, and open source makes the most benefits to everyone.
I suggest your best answer is "Who cares?!"
Really, why does it matter why we do it? So he can evaluate the answer and decide whether we deserve to be allowed to continue? Do we really have to justify sharing knowledge? This is a classic power-play question. Throw it back and ask him what part of "sharing knowledge" he has problems with.
Contribution policy:
Don't want money.
Got money.
Want admiration.
Mail? Put "slashdot" in the subject to pass the spam filters.
The fame, the free drugs, the hot chicks begging for my autograph... that's the life of a typical Open Source hacker. Who cares about money?
To me one of the most disgusting goals in one's live is the raw pursuit of wealth. I guess it comes from growing up with Star Trek TNG and hearing Picard go on about self betterment.
Travis
...that a congressman would wonder why anyone would do something and give it away.
That pretty much sums up the political mind set.
Folks help each other all the time in person, and nobody asks such stupid questions...it's just that the body of open software has become sooo huge that these dweebs fall into the trap of thinking
one person wrote it and just failed to capitalize
on it. NOT. It's a huge collections of little
"favors" to each other, only not in person, and
to no one specifically.
I don't know about you but I use the GPL and open source because I like to make money. I am more a hardware person then a software person you see.
There are two reasons that I do my code under the GPL. The first one is common enough. Just for fun. The 2nd is a little more complicated.
I have a set of tools that I drag around with me from one job to the next. All of them are under the GPL (software tools) and many friends of mine use those tools. They are not all that well made.... never intuative... command line.... and rather hard to use on the face of it. Though that has inproved over time. One of them even has a GUI now. What makes them usefull is that there isn't any tool out there that can do the same thing.
The reason they are under the GPL is that I don't want some company I work for turnning around and slapping their copyright on them just cause I happen to work for them. Then demading then I sign my rights over. That why they can have a copy of the tools when I leave but can't make any claim to them.
This works even better with other people that use the same tools. Many of them have inproved the tool for different jobs. Or inproved the tool for a job that I was doing.
Belive it or not this is really catching on in the hardware underworld where I make a living and I can see that it is becoming very popular. The GPL is the license of choice.
Anyway, that is just my two cents on why someone would want to use open source as a good way to go.
All human behavior can be explained by rational self interest. Accordingly, humans invented and named the concept of "trade", which occurs when parties exchange things of value in an attempt to each better themselves. Trade is good.
Some trade is catalyzed by money, but anyone who has ever traded one baseball card for another, or scratched somebody else's back in return for being scratched knows that some trade happens easily without money. This does not mean that money is a bad thing or that all trade should happen without money. That would just about silly as trying to suggest that the only thing of value is money. You can rely on free people choosing the mechanism of trade that benefits them the most in any given situation.
Software is a thing of value, and is naturally an object of trade. Software has obvious utility value, but it also has value as an intellectual property value. This value is the value of the ideas expressed in the source code. Ideas are highly prized and run the gamut from the simple to the inspired work of genius. People generally want to trade things they can generate faster than others for things they can't, because that way they maximize the flow of value, and this applies to the trade of ideas as well.
Open source software is a clever form of trade that maximizes value flow by using copyright to secure return on investment as access to ideas that build upon the ideas disseminated. By releasing software under an open source licence, an author trades the ability to use and extend the software in return for a secure interest in doing the same to the resulting combination of intellectual property. Companies often pay programmers just to program code that won't be sold, so why is it surprising at all that programmers have discovered barter in code amonst themselves.
Any entrepenuer knows that trade is often maximized by accepting a little uncertainty and risk. Like any form of entrepenuerial activity, this involves an investment up front in time and effort that will be rewarded later according to its value to others. In order to maximize the return on investement, the open source author wants as many people as possible to obtain and use the software, in the hopes that by winning mind share, more people will contribute their valuable ideas back and thereby complete the trade. Interestly, when this form of trade is completed, each side automatically reinvests. Because ideas don't have physical existence, this is a cake that you can have and eat. One does not "consume" ideas.
What could be a better outcome from Congress exercising its power "to promote the progress of science and arts" than highly catalyzed iterative, derivitive growth of intellectual property accessable to all?
I expect my views are somewhat different than the usual on the subject, as I'm not a rabid open or closed source advocate. I use what works.
Some software is too fundamental, or too generally useful, to be controlled by an entity that is interested in making money for itself and its stockholders. A company may decide to shift into a different market, letting some of its products languish (Arity did this; they developed a popular Prolog system, but then stopped development of it to concentrate on applications). Or a company may decide to change its marketing strategy, leaving previous users out in the cold (Franz, Inc., sold a Common Lisp system for around $500 a few years ago; that system is now $2500+). Or a company may simply go out of business. There were hundreds of developers left out in the cold when Apple dropped its Newton. Imagine if Python were closed source and Python, Inc., after losing lots of money in the dot-com crash, shut its doors in a similar fashion.
File compression software, operating systems, web servers, scripting languages...those are all too basic to be tossed about in a sea of marketing and corporatism. But other software is not so fundamental: games, packages relied on by niches (e.g. graphic artists), and so on. There's less reason to argue that these should be open source. And while Perl, Python, and TCL seem to be out-teching commercial offerings, it's not nearly so clear when it comes to CorelDraw and Photoshop vs. The Gimp for example.
1. A sense of obligation to the community
I used to *love* hacking my Commodore 64. I had a programmer's guide for it that documented it down to the circuit board wiring diagrams, and I learned 6502 assembly language with that book and a monitor cartridge. Feeling some nostalgia for programming, and having a neato idea that involved some low level CD-ROM access, I decided to make a go of it again. I went down to the local computer store and shelled out $100.00 for a C compiler. I needed some documentation, so I shelled out another $50.00 for what looked like a decent programming book. I banged out some examples of pretty run of the mill stuff (all those books seem to have the same kinds of things, maybe because the API very much encourages one kind of program), and then the next thing you know the book ended. Still not feeling like I knew what I needed, I spent some more money on another book-- I learned some painful lessons about API's and how the internal OS functions aren't documented any more (at least not by Microsoft) no matter how much you spend.
By the time I finished working my way through the second book, I knew enough to know that all my problems would be solved if I just registered as a developer and paid $100 for a device driver kit (I know they are free now, but they weren't then.) So here I am, on the verge of being $300.00 in the hole, still not any closer to implementing my silly little afternoon idea. The cost outweighed my interest in learning at that point. I just ran out of steam. Programming for me had always been fun, not work! At about the same time, I installed Linux kernel 1.2.13 for the first time. Docs and HOWTO's for miles! Fully documented system calls, and even the source code for the OS itself if I am willing to spend the time to get my head around it. Free compilers for any langauge you care to mention-- I have learned several scripting languages, learned more about C/C++, and even dabbled with some 32 bit assembly without having to part with any cash or "development tax", as I have come to call the cost of entry into the windows programming market. Hobbyist programming and hacking only exists in the windows market as ports from open source projects. I could put more than one kid through college for the money it would cost me to learn as much as I have on open source tools if I bought comparable Win32 tools (where they exist). I feel a debt to the community for giving me the highest quality tools to hack with, and I'm sure many other fledgling developers do, too. Meanwhile the competition has stooped to prosecuting schools in an effort to extract maximum profits.
2. Economics
If you write commercial software, it has to be a successful venture in order to survive. Microsoft has agressively destroyed or absorbed competitors in the PC market. The only way to compete is to give it away-- if you actually start making money, you show up on the radar and get clobbered. I think Netscape is a good example here, everything was fine until it actually started to look like they could make money. Soon after that, they got sucked into a war they didn't have the resources to survive. You just can't compete. So a lot of developers don't. They write solid code and put it out there. There is no room in the comercial market for their artistry unless they are willing to market and litigate their way in, and the ugly nature of competing with a monster sucks the joy out of programming for them. So they pay the bills during the day writing uninteresting things, and then they write what they want on their own time. Of course, students are good at finding time to contribute, too. I work as a system administrator, and hack code when I get time here and there. We find ways to do what we like to do, and part of the joy is having some other people with similar interests look at it and think, "Gee, that's pretty cool."
All human beings, and probably most semi-intelligent life-forms, have one underlying goal to everything they do: to make stuff happen. Humans want to poke and prod at the world, and see things change as a result of our input. When we manage to make a large change to our environment, we feel satisfaction and gratification. When we are trying to make a chance but nothing much seems to be happening, that's when we get frustrated and unhappy.
Some people want to make changes by having power over others. Some like to blow things up. Some like to build new things. Some like to affect other people mentally or emotionally, for good or for bad. But we all want to see our input to the world produce a noticable change.
Once upon a time, individual software developers really did make a difference in the technology we use. Nowadays, that is rarely true anymore. We're just cogs in the machine, and if we write good code or bad, it all evens out in the end. That's frustrating, because we feel like what we do doesn't matter.
That's why Open Source is the ultimate in coder gratification. Individual developers can introduce code that really does make a splash, without needing all the infrastructure of a corporation. We see the "extreme" cases where one or two coders, working from home, has managed to topple a big part of corporate America. (Linux, DeCSS, Mandrake's distro, Slashdot, the list goes on...) We see these and think that we'd rather be doing something like that, that really makes a difference and affects our world, than be a corporate cog in the machine where at best we can hope to make a lot of money, but never to have a huge effect on the world around us.
he better supports free software, because that's the only way he can save the government to be overthrown by open/free software zealots.
Just tell him that there is no other way to prevent the anti-governmental anarchists, freedom absolutists, mormons, NRA-lovers and "reborn whatever zealots" from taking over the world than to join them.
Just tell him how dangerous you guys are. That's all he has to understand.
I'm not a dev, because I don't have the skills. But I do love open source software, and do my part by using the works of others, encouraging friends and co-workers to take a look at Linux, and faithfully reporting bugs.
So why do I use Open Source?
- Better quality. I'm sick of the blue screen of death and am appalled at Microsoft's licensing schemes. Its a lot easier to get a response from an OS developer than it is to get tech support from a company whose software I paid for. They help me because they want people to use thier software.
- Free as in beer. That is a factor. I can try out different OSes and applications at now or low cost. To do what you can do with a Mandrake or Red Hat installation would cost several thousand dollars in the commercial world.
- Politics. As an IT guy, I appreciate open standards. If commercial apps had open standards on thier file formats my job would be a lot easier.
- Education. With OSS, I can set up a variety of servers, build a low cost ghetto router, and learn programming by looking at the source code of serious web browsers, operating systems, and office suites. Cannot see the source of commercial applications at all. If I keep at it, maybe I'll be up to contributing someday.
- Freedom from mismanagement. As one example, the makers of the Dungeons and Dragons game is preparing to release a software program for thier game. A lot of it has turned to vaporware. To most players the program will be unusable because of lacking features and lack of customizability. An opensource project, PCGen, provides much of the missing functionality. To thier credit, the company has said "You don't have permission, this does not comply with out open gaming license (where certain concepts can be used by 3rd parties), but as long as you aren't making money off it we don't care." If not for open source there would not be a program to do this job at all.
Just thought that input from a user would be helpful. Mod me as you see fit.
maddman
-- When a fool hears of the Tao, he will laugh out loud.
While I don't expect a lawyer to understand many people do their jobs because they enjoy the work itself, the money is a side issue
Coders code for the same reasons writers write, painters paint, sculpters sculpt, and musicians play music. They engage in those activities because it fills a creative void in their lives and the sense of accomplishment that comes with sucessfully solving the problem.
never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes
I think that's the very basic reason. It solves problems very very well. I know I've wanted to partake in OS projects just to 'give something back' as I use almost ONLY free as in beer software for personal uses.
But my main point is that OS software really works. It's as if every expert in the world that wanted to had a say in the design of [insert object here]. I myself have on multiple occasions tweaked OS programs that I found and liked, to be programs I liked even more. Just the other day, I modified smb2www to work by passing username/password pairs to my Win2K hosts. If it wasn't open source I would have just said "Oh crap, that would be a really useful program but it doesn't work. Poo." But, I could fix it. I had an OS instant message client I liked a while back, except it displayed idle times as raw minutes. I made it do hour:minute.
Now not everyone is a developer, or even able to code at all. But surely you've seen the OS spinoffs! Linux itself is an amazing example of this. Linux was one thing once. But, it is OS, and someone saw it and said "I wish it..." and a bit later, it DID! Then it's made available for everyone else. The original person gets a solution that fits perfectly for them, everyone else with the same problem gets the same great fitting solution.
OS software really works. But by it's nature, it is not as "beginner friendly". I have in all honesty see people struggle with a web browser interface. Compiling a program from downloaded source is FAR beyond these people, even when the instructions are laid out in plain simple language. Even when the instructions are shouted to them, I bet. These people often can't even find the installation program they downloaded when running Windows.
We have, on the other hand, made quite a bit of progress. My first unix/linux experience was with FreeBSD. Once I installed RedHat a few months later I was amazed with how easy it was. It still brought some fdisking into the picture, which is too much for some people though.
Health is simply dying at the slowest rate possible.
The reason that professional programmers, people who program for a living, work on open source projects seems to at least partially come from the enviornment that they are. Most of us are in corporate enviornments, and the goals of corporations and the goals of developers are often diametrically opposed. Programmers want to program, they want to write a lot of code, and write code using a lot of different technologies. Corporations on the other hand want programmers to write one thing( or at best one thing every couple of years ) and then maintain that one thing for an extended period of time. They want programmers to always develop in the same language and on the same platform.
:-)
This is what has driven me to the open source world, just being able to write a lot of code using different technologies. Just because i'm not an expert in a something at this very instant doesn't mean that I'm not interested in working on and learning that thing. Plus there is always lots of code that needs to be written
I get involved with a variety of Open Source projects because I an interested in complex software (Operating Systems, Programming Languages, etc), and I would never get the chance to work on such a project within a company like MS, Sun, IBM.
I am simply not talented enough, or educated enough, or both, to do this stuff on my own, or to actually be hired to do it; so getting involved in Open Source projects gives me the chance to learn about the technology and software that I would love to understand.
I contribute what I can: testing, maybe some documentation, installation and configuration help to others, discussing the higher level concepts that I do understand, researching software, knowledge and tools, and striving to get the smarter bunch to explain the details so I can one day be at their level.
For me the bottom line is trying to understanding something I am obsessed with, and this is the only way to really do it. I rarely bother which the stuff I already understand.
OSS = Free Education
I'm sure most open-sourcer's do "it" for similar reasons.
Now that I think about it the professional sports leagues don't feel real threatened by the weekend warrior even though they probably spend more money playing softball (with all the beer and all) than they spend at baseball games. I wonder why the big software corps are so afraid of us?
- Colnago
Richard Stallman answered this long ago. In academia, common practice dictates that when a problem is solved, you contribute it to the community in the name of progress. And not only that, your solution may not be the best possible one so you allow others to improve upon it. This is done because the number of problems far outweighs the number of solutions. Time and money can not be wasted on resolving problems that have already been solved.
Unfortunately, commercial software practice is at direct odds with academia. This practice dictates that you must first squeeze every penny out of your solution. Traditionally, this is done by guarding the source code.
For a long answer (but a good read) see James Hogan's _Voyage from Yesteryear_. Chironian civilization and software geeks have a lot in common: they tend to value respect and achievement above material stuff, and they exist in an environment where the economic rules are somewhat different from what humanity always had to live with before. The culture clash that drives the story may also provide some insight into the clash between traditional industry and free/open software. (I hope we won't have to fry any corporations off the map with exaWatt antiproton beams, though.)
The too-short answer: because it's fun to do the Right Thing without having to worry about fiddly financial and organizational stuff that doesn't interest us and, thanks to the characteristics of our medium, doesn't have to be important.
That is one of the most ridiculous questions about open source that I've ever heard. One may as well ask, "Why does one create small arts and crafts for free?" Clearly many humans have a need to create simply for the sake of creating. Restricting how/what/why we create is infringes upon our liberty and should not be treated lightly.
The real question is probably why those of us who choose to create software in our spare time might choose an open source license. It seems clear to me that an open source license frees our creation to live a life of its own so that it is not hindered by our own wims. It allows our creations to become something bigger and better than we, individually, were able to produce.
Open Source software is written because it is more efficient to write it that way.
From the point of view of some one producing something, software is an expense and has no value beyond what it does to help you produce what your business needs. A trivial example would be writing a book. You want a word processor to let you write the book. The word processor is an expense to writing the book, but it should help make the person more efficent in writing that book. But, any reduction in the cost of the software increases the profitability of the book.
So, the question then becomes how do you get your word processing software at the lowest cost, so you can write the book, and ake the most money.
1) Buy it from a group of programmers, marketers, salesmen, secretaries . . . who have written packaged and distributed a word processor (aka proprietary software company)
2) Hire programmers directly to write it for you.
3) Write it yourself.
4) Write just enough to help you write your book, and give the code away with the stipulation that improvements others need to be distributed as source code withthe same requirements freedoms and restrictions as you gave it away with (GPL).
#1 is the proprietary develpment model where software is bought from a company. It has worked pretty well so far, but is it really the most efficient method for all cases.
#2 gets done by a lot of people and businesses for software that customized specifically for that business, and no one else would probably want.
#3 is done once in a while, but one person can not create a full featured word processor on their own, and probably would not because they would not need all the features.
#4 brings in an interesting efficiency. You write just what you need to get the current job done. Then, make that software open source. Some one else decides they like the program, and it almost does the job they need except it needs to be able to embed images. So, they add image embedding to the program. A year later your next book needs pictures, if you had not open sourced your software you would have to write image embedding code yourself. But, because the software is open sourced some one else wrote that component and you have it ready to server your needs.
Another way to look at it from the corporation point of view is that the proprietary model involves all corporations paying a bunch of programmers, salesmen, managers and support staff to write a program, plus a profit margin.
The Open Source model involes all corporations paying a programmer (or 2) within their organization to add features and maintain the Open Source programs that they use. Other corporations that package and support Open Source products act as a sort of programmer pool for smaller businesses or individuals that either need the product as-is or need modifications.
And, the model that wins should be the one that produces the software that is needed at the lowest cost. Which is showing up in a lot cases the lowest cost method to produce software is open source.
Dastardly
There's been a lot of talk about why individuals open the source on projects, or contribute to OSS projects... but i think the congressman might be more interested in why a for-profit business would:
It can be a smart business decision.
When a company needs something to do business, it can either make it or buy it. For the most part, if the thing in question doesn't give the company some sort of edge on the competition, they'll buy it from someone who's in the business of making that type of product: it's usually cheaper than learning a how to make $thing well, buying the assets to make $thing, and the competition could buy it off the shelf from someone else in the $thing-making business. Dell doesn't make ethernet cards. They buy them from 3Com.
But software's a little different. Lots of companies that aren't in the software industry (or even a particular certain segment of the software industry) need in-house programmers for stuff like writing custom inventory tracking solutions and customer service operator front ends for the company's ubber-database. Things like inventory tracking can really shave money off a company's costs... and an operator's front end is pretty specific to the databases in question.
But office productivity suites aren't of any strategic value. People only think about the IMAP server program when it crashes. By and large, these companies will choose to buy such packages off the shelf. It's cheaper to do it that way.
But sometimes it's not. And if you can pool your spare programmer*hours with some other companies for a better way, you might want to go open source to keep one company from misbehaving or profiting off the final product at your expense... especially if the software is some type of necessary evil that you need for overhead, but isn't related to what you make money doing.
Sometimes a firm wants the strategic leverage that comes from having the capability to move into the supplier's turf. This is what IBM's support of the GNOME Foundation is all about... idealism aside: they want to have a bargaining chip against Microsoft that comes from a Ready-For-Primetime Linux Desktop GUI when they sit down to negiotiate the contract for Windows FU.
Companies can often open source their software when they know they're not making money off it anymore and don't want the cost of supporting or distributing it anymore. AOL doesn't need Netscape; ID doesn't need the original DOOM. So they've both been released under open source licenses. Farmed most of the support and continuing development to all the free labor in "the community".
But most open source software, to my knowledge, does come out of the academic and hobbyist community, and political motives aside these people are better off opening their source if they're not in a position to start a business around it.... If you run just as good a chance of loosing as making money if you tried to market, support, and continue developing it, and you make a living some other way, you're probably better off taking the sure payback of $0.00.
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
What fun is keeping programs and things all to yourself? The beauty is in sharing- handing out your craft to those in society that would understand, appreciate and/or need it the most. You can simultaneously contribute to to the culmination of an application (or a whole OS even), and also be encouragingly critiqued by your peers. It is a bonding process, a learning process, and a way to define your own little slice of computing history. :o)
Someone thousands of miles away will come across a program you wrote, and send you an email telling you how much they love it, or it was the perfect thing that they needed. Someone can take what you have and build on top of it, and make something better than even you dreamed could happen.
Whether the result of community projects turn into a work of art, or a complete catastrophy... it is the cast of thousands that make the difference. Simply put, we are like a family, and this is what we do. If you don't believe it, look at how we fight like siblings. And like any family, we were taught to share.
I think so many people go with Open Source and free software because of how hard it is to sell software which you made on your own time. For example, say Joe Teenaged Geek makes a cute new system tray applet for Windows, one that is so amazingly useful that they can't believe everyone else doesn't already use it. They decide to slap a $30 price tag on it, because simmilar products are already available from commercial suppliers, albeit with much less speed and features. They have three options for marketing it:
1. Try to sell it to a pre-existing large software house. If he tries, 99% of the time he will fail, being a spare-time coder without any particular credentials. If he *does* get through to them, they slap on a bunch of restrictive licensing for the user, or change the developer's code to the point where they can claim ownership of it themselves. They could even duplicate his efforts if it is a fairly simple piece of work.
2. He can try and get the applet bundled along with some new piece of hardware on one of those CDs that Walnut Creek or some other shareware marketing company puts out, but then he would have competition with many other like-minded youngsters. These people would probably lose valuable filesystem real-estate to big companies who are willing to pay more per kilobyte than the independant producers. Mr. Geek would also have to come up with a registered company to do business through, and a whole lot more paper hassle. If he has school or work to go to, this might be more sweat capital than he is willing to invest.
3. Try and release it on his own through one of the many software download sites. Then he has to try and get his work recognized to the point where it is worth going around and downloading and installing, and he will need some sort of technical support for Joe Average User who can't understand InstallShield or the custom installer he set up for himself which seemed to work ok on his own machine. In the end, he might even get a bad review from the sites he posts on, and nobody will want to buy or even download it.
On the other hand, Joe Teenaged Geek could try releasing the code for his app and a few binary versions on his web site, toting the virtues of using it, providing a message board for people to make suggestions on how to fix it, and even sending him compliments or job offers based on the quality of his code. There are many people who go this route, and it is always a handy way to show off your skillz as a developer.
In other cases, you can give stuff away for free what most people wouldn't consider buying for shareware. Chatterbots, for example, are neat little programs, and a lot of people like to see how they work on the inside, as well as write scripts for their built-in backend. Shareware versions only rarely come with source code, so people will tend to gravitate towards the free and open source ones that everyone has heard about. Jason Hutchens, who won the Loebner Prize a number of times, posts the binary and source forms of his various bots on the web, helping to educate other developers and earning respect and peer review.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
Best of luck with your meeting! For a Congressman to actively seek opinions from "one of us" gives me some hope.
You may find some helpful information from the following articles:
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Freeware Creators Eye Corporate Users
The reason I write software and put it in the public domain is to make the world a better place. That's the goal in life, right?
I've got only so much time. I want to use it to improve the world as much as possible. I get more bang for the buck writing software (that many people can use) than building physical things (that only one person can use). My software gets used most when I give it away free. So, I write software and give it away free.
As one who made it through college on a donated computer because I was too poor to buy one myself...
I like Open Source because the people are generous, in terms of both time and monetary savings.
When I started learning computers on Windows, I'd find something that I needed, but the author wanted $15 for something that was some VB program barely more than this:
Sub OverpricedSharewareProgram()
MsgBox "Hello World!"
End Sub
I sought alternatives, and Open Source was there to save the day, whether it was gcc or something else.
Granted, I could have been among the "smart" people that were copying Office CD-ROMs and sharing them with their buddies. I didn't feel right doing that, though. [I don't feel so dumb, now that Microsoft is using trial editions and software rental schemes to turn the screws on these people.]
Also, Open Source people are good with their time and knowledge. Most people turn to philosophers like RMS and the high principles of the GPL for inspiration. I identify with hard-working people like Holger Veit, who was in charge of the XFree86-OS/2 project. He had zero time to play and be friendly, but he answered every question that nobody else would answer. His answer was always accurate and a little more thorough than was needed to solve the problem. He taught people about the workings of X11 while solving their problems. Such a work ethic inspired me to be the same way.
Holger was just my example. Others may see the same example in Linus, Perl guru Tom Christiansen, or Ruby author Yukihiro Matsumoto. I'm sure I could continue the list for another half hour.
Several years ago, it became my turn to give back to the community. My efforts at giving code away were done in the process of solving my own narrow problems, so I haven't gotten much feedback. However, I have spent much time in mailing lists and on Usenet, trying to solve problems in my spare time. I reason that it takes more than raw source code to keep the community running smoothly, and that makes me feel good.
Hopefully, I have helped out a poor college student along the way.
Michael
Open source is not unlike a huge pot luck dinner. We all bring something and we get back a complete meal rather than a single dish. The biggest difference is that software is easily copied. So we each brought a single serving and got back meals for the entire year.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
The reason for not obscuring code of the program is really strange object to look for. Someone better look for reasons to obscure code (bad design, want people to assume that you are not as bad as you are).
...nobody rides for free.
We *ALL* expect something in return for the work we do, whether the source code we write is copy-lefted, open-sourced, or locked up tighter than your mama's asterisk. Anybody who tries to make the Congressman believe otherwise is trying to sell something for more than it's worth.
Why do we publish the source code where anyone can read > compile > install > use > modify it for their own purposes without having to pay us for the "right" to do it?
BECAUSE NONE OF US HAVE ANY MONEY!
We write it and give it away, because we know the sorts of people that we would be asking to pay us for it.
They don't have any more money than we do.
Sure, some of us are poorer than others, but almost none of us have positive net worth we can count in the millions of dollars. So we publish it under weird open source licenses and expect other forms of compensation:
+ Fee for service. "You want it to do what else?"
+ Publicity. "I wrote that. If you want more, I'm available for special jobs."
+ Barter. "I can make it do that, but you have to fix this other problem for me."
It's not big business. It's small business. And it's about the only way that a small entrepreneur can start a software business without having to give away the whole store to a venture capital firm. If you want to sell shrink-wrapped software, the cost of sale is way too high to start. You have to get into the market with open source.
You say it like that, and the Congressman will understand.
--j h woodyatt
jhw
If you could start a business, and finish the product, while authoring or buying all of the components you needed to make your product release quality, AND supply all of the support users require (or pay someone else to do it) all with the same amount of effort it takes to begin a project, using open source components wherever you like and leave it unfinished but allow others to polish it for free, and supply limited support if any, then you would.
But it's not that easy. Making money from software is difficult, and time consuming. Open source developers want the results, and they want access to everyone elses work, so they don't have to invest an extra few months here and there writing code that has already been written and is free. And they don't want to buy expensive middleware either.
This is just about cooperation guys, I leaned about this on Sesame St. People who cooperate get more done, and quicker. Then they can move on to other cool stuff.
Most software development is not done for commercial reasons (i.e. not to sell the software as a COTS). Most development is done to advance corporate and public systems in ways that don't give the using corporation a competetive advantage but simply improve some process (a financial system interface, a distributed print service). The developers do the work because they are directed to do so or because they are passionate about their work and see an opportunity to do something useful. Many of these developers and even their employers would have no problem releasing their work to help others - if it was easy for them to do so.
Some of these folks are passionate enough about their interests to initiate or join open source efforts. In some cases their employers officially support and sanction their efforts (IBM, Cisco, others). Call it ego, call it community, whatever the drive is it is powerful and could probably be harnessed much more broadly than we see today. The fact that more and more corporations are willing to support such contributions shows the possibilities.
I do it because the equivalent commercial products suck. They are overpriced ( to the tunes of thousands of dollars ) and not as feature rich. Working for an ISP providing dialup services, having a functional Radius server that is scalable, reliable, and most of all, easily modified is paramount to the success of our business.
So, I get paid by my employer to write code that ends up under the GPL in the server. The entire world gets a killer server for a great price. And my employer gets the benefit of a larger array of "virtual programmers" who are constantly reviewing and improving the code. It's a shared development cost more than anything else.
Plus, I like writing code, and I've gotten to interact with people from all over the world as they use the server.
My 2 cents anyway. Others have probably said it better than I, but this is why *I* write code and give it away. :)
---
Segmentation Fault ( core dumped )
I'm going to answer a slightly different question, why do I do it.
There are a few distinct reasons I do it:
That said, there are some reasons I don't do Open Source:
It keeps all the rest in check, competitive.
While the answers as to why individuals write free software will satisfy Rick Boucher's personal curiousity, in order to help him support the free software movement a different question also needs to be answered, especially when the above is being asked by a decision maker that is not yet commited to free software: Why is it in the interest of the community to move from the propriety software framework to the free one.
Answers to the second question were already given by a good number of capable people. Many Ideological answers reside on the Free Software Foundation philosophy pages (to name an obvious source), but decision makers will be more interested in the practical ones.
Practical answers for the community question are also abundant, such as the ones on the Opensource website (to name another obvious source); I also remember a nice economical analysis on free software posted recently on slashdot (could someone please provide the URL?).
A 2-liner for Mr. Boucher: When sufficiently many people are involved in free software, the productivity of the entire community increases substantially. Therefore it is in the economical interest of the community to provide financial incentives, such as job positions, to free software developers.
Recently, as more demonstrations of productivity increase are witnessed, major companies like IBM have started financing free software developement in order to share in the benefits.
So, when it comes to writing software, which (to me) includes designing as well as implementing it, naturally I want to add to the body of trustware that's out there, so other people will respect my software too. (And I recently read a little note on the G95 website that suggests, hey, maybe some of them do, despite all the faults in g77.)
2) It's "My" Code...
Examples of what developing GPL'ed software allows me to do, that developing proprietary software does not allow me to do:
There are plenty of other reasons, already given elsewhere, like "making the world a better place" and stuff, but these are items that often don't get mentioned, or valued, in such discussions, and which "young" programmers, such as those just starting out in a proprietary-software company, might not have thought through. (E.g. all that code they wrote the previous few years becomes nearly useless to them the moment they get laid off or quit -- they got paid $$ to write it, but that's pretty much where the relationship ends.)
When it comes to having people know about the software I've written throughout the years, no question that g77 far outranks anything else I've done, since comparatively few people ever, e.g., used the BATCH subsystem under PRIMOS, read the Pr1me "Advanced Programmer's Guide" series, etc.
And when it comes to my occasionally wanting to hack on some software with which I'm familiar, the only software I worked on to which I presently have such free access is g77. It represents probably only 20% of my career output to date, that figure depending somewhat on whether technical docs are included, but it's the only large free software (and documentation) I've written.
All that other software and docs? Swallowed up in failed and/or bought-out-and-then-shut-down companies, and, since I didn't have the rights I have with GPL'ed software, it's basically all gone, regardless of its usefulness.
Free software, on the other hand, is likely to disappear from the face of the earth only if it is truly found to be useless. Even marginally useful free software will likely find a haven in various archives around the world. Authors of really useful free software needn't worry about backups -- as Linus once said, just put your latest hacks up on your website and let the rest of the world mirror it!
Practice random senselessness and act kind of beautiful.
The popular news and discussion site Adequacy.Org has recently posted this article which provides a good in-depth look at the psychology behind the Open Source movement. It's pretty fair and even-handed; you might want to give it a look.
Check out Steve Weber's work on the topic. WP 140, "The Political Economy of Open Source," articulates some interesting stuff.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftam esse delendam.
Lets be real, I'm sure your all altruists here, but i considder it enlightened self interest...
:)
This is the most amazing route I have seen to getting your name on a widely distributed product. Market share, Mind Share, whatever buzzwords yould like to use, it is a powerful way to get your work seen, and avoid taxes (shhh) In fact its a tax write off if you spend money in the endeavor (shhhh). Think about it... Gifts are not taxable, alot of GNU/GPL users make it possible to accept gifts which consequently are not taxable... Ever get a cd or money or shares of stock ina new company that used your product? Gee Non taxable income. Great... How much did you spend to put it out to advertise your skill, Figure that one out and you have a tax writeoff!
Then of course you benefit people, and are benefited in return by having an improved computing environment added to. As far as self advertising goes. You have nothing to lose if your good at what you do. None not as talented is gonna take your product and show you up with it. And if they have the skill to do that... They could do it without your help. You lose nothing.
SO, lets see, turn your hobbie or solutions into fame and even money... gain taxfree income and get a tax writeoff! Rock on
But dont tell congress, thay'll find a way to tax your gift income.
Bastards!
regaurds,
Skullptor
PS I have an account here, but remain anonymous, I dont need the IRS breathing down my neck!
Because it is not there.
In effect I was given a free operating system which performed much better than what I'd been using previously. Now I'm not a good enough coder to contribute to the kernel or XF86 or any of the major projects, but the small things I do write for my OS, mainly for my own benefit, I release free for everyone else to use. Obviously this is voluntary but in a way it's like payment for the OS I love. If other people are going to give me software it seems rude to make them obey a more stringent license if they want to use the software I wrote for their system.
Because helping to develop open source software makes good business sense for them.
Why does it make good business sense? One reason is that they are giving something away so that they can leverage that free product to sell something else. These companies make money off of selling products and services related to open source products. In order to maximize the size of their market, it makes sense for them to help with Linux development, for instance. The better Linux is, the more people will use it. More people using it means more people will buy their products and services.
There are nay-sayers who say that this isn't a sustainable business model, but other very successful companies do this all the time. They give away something so that they can sell more of something else. Ask yourself why Microsoft gives away its browser for free. For Microsoft it is better not to charge for their browser so they will increase their browser market share. They are trading current dollars for future profits from the sale of browser-related software and services. AOL does the same thing with their on-line service. They give away tons of those CD with their software because they know that they can make it back from selling online access and content.
The other way in which open source development makes business sense is in the control. When IBM wants a particular piece of software or hardware to work with Linux, they simply add the necessary code to the operating system and contribute it to the community. The new code gets propogated into all new updates of Linux, and now more people are able to use their for-profit product. On the other hand, because IBM doesn't have control over Windows, they have to beg and plead for them to add a feature to Windows they they may want. In short, they have no control over the code.
Finally, contributing to Open Source is great from a marketting standpoint. All of the Joe Random Hackers out there appreciate the fact that this big company is pitching in to help. This gives them a "warm and fuzzy" feeling about the company. On the other hand, companies that attack the open source movement (Microsoft) are scorned by the Joe Random Hackers of the world.
This is one reason why Ben and Jerry's has been so successful. When you by a pint of Cherry Garcia, you aren't just buying a tasty snack, you are buying into a whole philosophy of business. People are willing to spend a couple extra bucks for this "warm and fuzzy" feeling.
Anyway, it's nice to say that people contribute to the open source movement because it feels right, but that alone doesn't explain why.
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com
I think that many of the people who work on free software do it because they or their employers simply see that approach as the most effective way to get the quality software they need. They have problems they need to solve, and this has nothing to do with the stereotypical "volunteer" open source developer scratching a personal itch. A lot of Linux-related work comes out of NASA and other large organizations which need software to get their work done, can't buy what they need off the shelf, and have no motivation for keeping their code secret. Under those circumstances, why not make the source open?
The AT&T/UNIX example is a classic. Had AT&T been allowed to market UNIX as a product, we'd probably all be using some sort of crappy VMS descendant. ;)
After 25 years or so of the closed-source experiment, people are beginning to realize that the closed-source approach has its limitations; so, the alternatives are getting attention. But we shouldn't be surprised that people do this, any more than we're surprised that scientists and economists publish in journals.
This is yet another instance of altruism (the almost exclusively human quality of doing things for others that has virtually no benefit for yourself).
It's an oft-discussed topic in psychological and sociobiological circles. Why would anyone devote time and effort to something that has little or no benefit for yourself.
There are lots of ideas as to why people do altruistic things. One that appeals to me is Susan Blackmores theory based on memetics. That is, we do altruistic things because it is beneficial for memes.
Take a read of her book, The Meme Machine, it goes into quite a lot of detail.
Since the majority of script kiddie's are scrawny pimple faced geeks (hey, a was one) who have trouble fullfilling step 4 (luv, esteem) they tend to be stuck at step 3 (Sense of Belonging, gang membership).
I write free software in order to write code that will be used in the real world. Most of the code that I write professionally will never see the light of day. The project will change directions at an executive's whim, or the whole project will be canceled, or the company will go bankrupt.
I suspect that very little of the software written for hire is every put into production.
Second, the stuff I write commercially is always twisted to some extent by the organizational/marketing agenda of the employer/customer. Free Software is my chance to write code that's clean and logical.
Third, software that I write for hire is never really finished. There is no money in budgets for polishing code. Once it works I'm on to something else, although the code is full of commented-out bits and unused variables and might need a complete rewrite.
Summary: programming for a living causes an ever-increasing accumulation of bitterness. Writing Free Software counteracts that bitterness with the sweetness of a clean, logical, complete project that might be used by many.
We all have, or should have, our favoirite charity/cause. Is that so hard for a politician to understand? Aren't they there to serve the public good?
I just have to wonder... is the same question asked of Microsoft.. why do you close your source?
Why not extend that to intellectual property in general? The whole existence of the Open Source movement is a counter-argument to the commonly cited justification for patent regs: That innovation will cease unless innovators are remunerated. Can anyone here say "surplus value"....?
you know it's all for the chicks, man. no, wait. what was this post about again?
it's all part of building a reputation. much like a photographer has a portfolio, a programmer can prove himself in open source. yes, there's ego in that, but it's also practical.
on top of that, i think sharing is a traditional part of hobbies. "hey, look what i just found out" and "look at this thing i just did" are part of the "geek personality" that goes with a strong love for technology, just like any other hobby. mustang collectors go to mustang shows to show off their cars and the work they put in (try posting on a car forum for suggestions on how to get more horsepower out of your car). geeks are doing the same thing.
"Mister Potato-head --MISTER POTATO-HEAD! Backdoors are not secrets!" (War Games, 1983)
is that not everyone does everything to make money.
Some people work on cars for fun. Some paint. Some do woodwork. Some people teach kung-fu to kids. Some do community volunteer work.
The motive can be entertainment, or feeling good about yourslef, making a difference, or whatever.
Too often, the media views 'programming' as 'work', like we are all 'working' for free. We aren't... it's a hobby, too.
Do you think we go home at night and our computers always do everything we want them to without a second thought?
No, we have to struggle and smash and fight to get things working just like everyone else. It's just that our tool-kit includes writing programs to solve our problems.
So, if I decide I need a new email client because Outlook crashes all the time, I might just write one. This is called "scratching the itch", perhaps reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" would be helpful?
If I can go online and download source for a simple mail program, I might use that as a starting point instead.
Once the program is written, what do I do with it? There's free software, open source, freeware, shareware, and retail software.
The only ones that even allow other people to fix bugs and make my software better are Free software and Open Source. Since I'm after a bug-free useful email client, and I figure there must be other people with the same need, I'm most likely to choose one of those.
I write my programs/utilities because I find a need for them, and there is nothing available that does what I need (or I just can't find it).
:)
I release my programs to the public because if I found a need for it, chances are that someone else does too. And why should that person have to re-do what I've already done? Sure, there are times when I will want to restrict my works and put them under a more strict licence than the GPL, but those are not the common case.
And I certainly get a kick out of getting an email from a complete stranger saying "hey, you're program is great! Thanks!", or even the old bug report "I was trying to use your program, but...". It all means that someone else found it useful, and that is a huge kick for me
I second this. Thank you for having the courage to be honest, even if some people do think it's "corny".
... and it's frustrating. So much effort goes into coding, it just feels like it should be doing a lot of people a lot of good. So some programmers choose to actually make that happen!
I think this is not a rare motivation at all. As programmers, most of our work goes into little systems that only helps some corner of some company for a limited time
The problem is that not enough people band together, start a (semi) formal development programme with solid requirements, and then code/test it to completion ...
... even if they're really bad ideas! It's the opportunity that matters.
Agreed -- absolutely. Programmers, in spite of being so social online, are still too reclusive about their work.
I'm sure Source Forge is littered with thousands of "Version 0.001" releases that will never make it to the "actually useful" stage.
But this is necessary and inevitable -- it's important that people have a shot at developing their own ideas, even if it's just a little bit
One big difference between the open source and commercial worlds is that with OSS, even if you're working on somebody else's project, you could be working on your own. It's a world of pure choice, and that's a beautiful thing.
It's evolution -- in a large pool of ideas, most don't make it far. But the large pool is very important, even if most of it dies off quickly.
Microsoft doesn't care about creating usable interfaces and won't let me do a damn thing about it. I could go up to Bill Gates and say "Hey, Bill, your software is unusable. It's contains lots of designs that no self-respecting HCI person would ever recommend. I can rework your programs so that people can learn them faster and use them more efficiently". And do you know what Bill would tell me "That's nice. The exit's on your left". This also goes for just about every software company on the planet. When I have the code for a GUI environment, I have the power to make interface design decisions that need to be made. I don't have to deal with programmers who don't give a damn or software executives who don't have a clue.
I wrote a text-based Yahoo! Messenger client several years ago, because I wanted to be able to talk to my friends around the world while using computers that were not my own without having to install any software; so I'd telnet to a shell account I had and run my text-based client. Just this summer, I received a very appreciative e-mail from a blind user who finds that the text-based interface makes it easier for his text-to-speech software to work with Yahoo! Messenger. It was at that particular moment that I felt just this utterly touching thrill, as I realized I had personally done something, small though it may be, that benefits other people and therefore the world. Take that feeling times a thousand, and I'm sure that's what it feels like to be the original author of an amazingly popular piece of software, such as the Linux kernel, the Apache web server, or the various parts of GNOME and KDE, which make it so much easier for more people to have access to an alternative to Windows and MacOS.
In summary, we do it because we are a part of humanity.
Why did Einstein create the theory of relativity while working as a patent clerk? Why did Michaelangelo refuse to paint what the pope wanted and instead painted the roof of the Sistine Chapel to look how we know it today? Why does anyone spend so much time making a sand castle or an ice sculpture, even though they will soon be destroyed? Altruism comes in to the picture, but there's a certain satisfaction to be had in doing a job right, in making a thing of beauty. When the job is done, it's like there's a little light inside, creating a warm and exciting feeling. Perhaps out of ego and desire for praise, perhaps out of a desire for others to see this beautiful thing that's bottled up inside. It's like being a child again, but with the perspective of an adult to make it even more savory and sweet. Why does a child say things like, "Look, mommy, I can tie my shoes!" Programming for open source is something a programmer can be proud of. He codes it for himself or a friend, and then shares the code with everyone because it costs him nothing to do so, and it feels good too. A closed source programmer is often forced to compromise his work to meet deadlines, and then he is buried in anonymity behind the corporate facade and his work is obsured by a compiler. This situation creates the kind of dissatisfaction that leads to programmers making easter eggs that identify them.
:)
There's another motive that drives many of us. In a closed source world, where all the decently recent code is closed source, it's hard to learn how to program. This situation is fine for the professional programmer who can join a closed source shop to lear, but what about the hobbyist? The one who has no desire to get a job programming, but who still wants to put together some code? In order to really learn how to program, you need to see examples of programs. The tutorials available are helpful, but it's like trying to learn how to write a novel by reading short stories.
There's also the saying, "Many eyes make light bugs." Debugging is hard. With open source, someone else can help find those pesky bugs, and even improve the program, all in exchange for the free use that costs the original programmer nothing.
Open source is about all of that, and a thousand other reasons that I could hope to list even if I knew them all.
Hope I've helped
Offtopic sig: Let me get this straight: Microsoft is off the hook, but a Arab Website in Texas got raided!?
I've been reading through many of the comments in this article, and they seem to be missing one thing:
To contribute back, what they have taken from the Open Source community.
I can't speak for everyone, but I can say that when I discovered Open Source software as a University student, I was amazed, dumbfounded, incredulous, ... and very grateful. Thank god there was a free Unix variant out there that I could install on my home PC, and be able to do my computing assignments on. Otherwise I would have had to rely on the computer labs, and that was a nightmarish place a few days before an assignment was due.
This is how the Open Source system is truly like a virus. Not because of any Licence that the code is released under. Not many individuals really pay much attention to a Licence, when it comes down to it. Open Source is like a virus because it makes us want to contribute back, in a sort of payment to people whom we have taken from.
This is the best kind of virus. It doesn't demand from you and forcibly take away from you. It doesn't restrict you and impose its will on you. It gives freely, and if you are able to give back, then your efforts are accepted.
This is one virus I could wish everyone comes down with.
Open-Source is made because it would be done anyway. If you're doing your math homework and you decide you want a program to handle some of the tediuos calculations for you, is there any point in withholding the source code? Of course not.
Open source software is created because of the needs of the individual. Linus wanted to make a terminal emulator, I guess because he didnt like the one he was using. When he had something he liked, he uploaded it to ftp. Because it was for personal use, chances were things wouldnt work exactly the same on someone else's computer, so if they want it for personal use too, they have to make it work for themselves.
I see Open Source as something which we wioll eventually all turn to: A Programmer is hired by a company to carry out a specific task, he codes it, and in the future anyone else can use what he makes.
so why do we open source? For one thing, we dont have any reason not to. It encourages others to do better than us, enouraging us to do better than ourselves.
For another, It's become popular, so it isnt inconvenient to do it. If nobody used open source, people might be caught off-gaurd having to compile programs themselves. However, since open source is being used by many people, we've got a standard "configure, make, make install" proccess, which doesnt put anyone in unfamiliar territory.
So we make it open source because we're making it in the first place and there's no point in not making it open source. The benifits of it, I dont think are related. While we have so many benifits though, there's no point in fighting open-source.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
1) Programming is more fun than watching TV.
I watch TV voluntarily - without pay...why
would I charge people for my programming?
2) Sometimes I need a program for my own personal
use. It's not significant enough to sell, so
I might as well give it away.
3) Sometimes I want help in writing a BIG program
that I need - something that's too big or
difficult to write by myself in a reasonable
amount of time. Getting other people to help
out with the project is a lot easier if it's
given away free in the end.
4) Once I've written a large and possibly
significant program, sometimes it's more
useful to have a whole bunch of people
maintain and enhance it for free than it
is to get income from sales and use that
to pay someone to maintain it.
5) Ego. Yes, I'm afraid so. It's really nice
to get email from admiring users saying
what a nice, intelligent, generous person I
am. (And I am! And modest too!)
6) Jobs. I've had many lucrative consultancy
jobs because people saw my OpenSource work,
used that to gauge that I had the skills
they needed and chose me over other people
to do some high-quality, paying job.
7) Fixing bugs. If I find a bug in an Open
Sourced program, it's often quicker to fix
it myself and post a patch than to wait for
the original author to do it.
8) I enjoy programming - but people won't
usually pay me to just follow a whim and
write the thing that I most feel like writing
on any given day. So I *have* to give it
away.
9) The desire to "give something back" to the
community. Personally, this could never be
the only reason - but it helps to support
reasons 1 through 8.
10) The main reason is of course: Chicks.
Man, those babes at the beach really go
for us OpenSource geeks...beats a Red
Ferrari any day...(or so I'm told. I
don't have time to go to the beach
anymore - but if I did, they'd be
all over me).
Richard Stallman
I write scientific software to run experiments, take data, do simulations, etc. I share my work with my students and anyone else who asks for it because it advances knowledge. It seems like the most reasonable thing to do.
As I was thinking about what to write I realized the question of why I write software and give it away is also the reason. Hopefully this will make more sense by the time I finish, if not please email me for any clarifications or questions. :)
;)
I would also like to have a disclaimer that I work for a company that has commercial, closed source, software and I am the main developer for that program. Although my preference is Open Source, my employer has final say in how the software I write on their time is used. I like working for the company, so we have an agreement about releasing some code openly and some closed.
My first exposure to "Open Source" software (c: it was not called that at the time) was in the Marine Corps, I was stationed on El Toro in Santa Ana, CA and tasked with being the "firewall administrator." The first thing I did was look for the fire exists and extinguisher.
Because I was given this responsibility, and the Military would not train me on maintaining the system (c: nobody else there knew it and we did not have the money for classes), I was forced to start poking around on the system. The system was using BSDI and Gauntlet as the firewall software.
When I didn't know how something worked, or when I had the question "why" I could always start looking. I took a long time before I ever managed to fix my own mistakes, but I learned how to troubleshoot and tackle problems procedurally. This helped tremendously when I was in the field, when other people would get overwhelmed by inspections, formations, the route for the march, etc. I just broke it down and started to pick it apart like the firewall.
Had the Military sent me to any formal training I don't think I would have had that, because I would have stopped learning when I knew how to perform the basic functions. Or I would have waited for someone to send me to a class where I would be told most of what I needed to do and provided with the information. There would also be no opportunity to become enthralled in why this box did what it did, which would not have translated into learning how to handle situations where I am not given every piece of information or a long time to prepare.
When I was transferred from MCAS El Toro to MCAS Miramar in 1998 my SNCOIC was sent to the secondary 40xx MOS school. In that class they used a Portuguese version of Linux to setup DNS servers. There were two main reasons that they used Linux, the cost and the availability.
Keep in mind that not every department in the Military has a ton of money, some of the 3MAW units were still using 486 computers on the desktop when I was on MCAS Miramar in 1999. They were able to do this because the servers were running Banyan VINES, which hosts the email and file storage at the server rather than the local computer. When we were forced, even after I put up a BIG fight, to migrate to Windows NT as part of the BRAC this changed; virtually all of the networking and desktop systems, which had not been recently purchased, had to be torn out.
The cost justification for using Linux to teach was that it wouldn't have to be authorized for the budget and could be setup quickly because it was freely available.
I don't know if you are familiar with the way the budget works, but if you don't spend the money you are allocated for the year you loose it; and your budget for the next year is probably going to be lower. There's no incentive to NOT spend money like it would never end.
But not everybody had that money, so using Linux provided the lowest common denominator that everyone could use.
After having been on MCAS Miramar I was one of the only people with Unix backgrounds, everyone else learned NT because of the BRAC migration. When talking to one of the other "old timers" on another base, I became aware of the number of programmers the DoD has. Yet the DoD does not write much of its own software for general use, they use COTS software instead.
The money the DoD spends on buying software could easily finance the programmers writing that functionality into any needed software. This software could easily be used in other Government departments and would not require the purchase of an entirely new application to get any needed functionality or features.
I realize my thought process is has run away, so to cut this short and summarize my reason for writing code and giving it away is because I like to ask "why".
If you are interested, some specific examples of why include:
1. I am a Marine and I come from a _very_ military family; of my 9 siblings 6 have already served in addition to my Father and Uncles. I never want to hear about a Marine, Sailor or Soldier killed in combat because their Pocket PC crashed. Nothing will ever be completely fail safe, but Open Source allows for a bigger review process with a better chance of finding problems.
Consider encryption, why doesn't the Government keep their encryption schemes a secret if they are supposed to be used to secure the most sensitive data they have? Why not throw all the Russians in jail under the DMCA if they try to break the encryption? We could have ended the Cold War a lot quicker that way.
2. The DoD has a lot of programmers, what would it look like from a cost savings perspective if those programmers contributed to Open Source? How much money would the DoD save in making Linux Common Criteria Certified and deployed internally. Use SE Linux, created by the
NSA, on the servers and critical desktops, SAMBA for file and print sharing, etc. The put the money towards beans, band-aids and bullets.
This is one of my motivations, because I have "been there, done that" in the field with old, outdated, hand-me-down equipment falling appart. The justification was always that we did not have the money, but if you went into our comptuer room we have rows of Compaq Proliant 6500 computers fully loaded running Windows NT. With Linux we would not need machines that big, or that expensive. We would also save money on the licensing and not have to upgrade so often.
3. If I write software I usually learn something in the process, often not just about the program but about myself as well. But if I have other people contributing to my code I can learn from them as well, if the code is closed they are less likely to contribute their knowledge and experience. This allowed me to learn things much faster and tap a much broader knowledge base when I get into a Portuguese bind (c: BIND = = DNS).
4. So I can ask why. Why does this work? Why _doesn't_ this work? Why can't I do what I want to do?
By asking "why" I poke and prod until I either have more questions or until I get sued and put in jail.
Unlike many people I do not tend to stop when I am faced with what at first appears to be an unanswerable question; I pick it appart or ask for the assistance of others to find the answer; which leads to more questions.
Because it is not the answer that is important, it is where you are left after having had the inquiry.
What good is it to talk to myself?
That is what it is like to program with closed source software, nobody but your co-workers can see what you have created. Nobody can witness that clever algorithm you created to solve a really thorny problem; all they see is the result of the program in action.
As an example, earlier today I had a co-worker who took a 15 line script for error checking and re-wrote it in 2 lines of regular expressions. But that is not the interesting part for me, when he sent me the new code he pointed out that I "always make things difficult" when they do not have to be.
My program is an expression of myself. Who I am being when I write software is the same, generally speaking, as when I am with family and friends. When he pointed out to me that I always make things more difficult, one of the first things that came to mind was that a very dear friend had said the same thing to me the night before.
When someone comments on my code or my coding stle, they are commenting on who I was being when I wrote that code. It is an extension of how I choose to express myself under that particular situation.
By opening the source I can have the inquiry with the world with amazing results. What happens when you are open to the possibility of allowing others to contribute to not only your program but yourself in the process.
Semper Fi,
Wayne Pierce
Former SGT USMC
PS: I am MUCH better with firewalls now.
----
wpierce at athenasecurity dot com
VP of Technology
Athena Security
Information Security is a process, not a product.
Why do you make up a joke and tell it to people?
While they can make "under-the-hood" changes legally with Linux, they are limited to suggestions on how to configure Microsoft products. More flexibility.
Besides, every software solution Uncle Sam doesn't have to pay for saves taxpayer dollars, and no Congressman can be against that. Even NASA takes lowest bidder, and they do do rocket science!
--
Freeper Logic
I guess we all know why Congressman Rick Boucher is in politics...
I don't know about all you guys, but I do it for the women.
-cibrPLUR
This is a bit similar to other answers, but one of the reasons I'm thinking of starting a GPL project (and probably contributing to a few existing projects) is that as a corporate programmer, I'm tired of writing the same frameworks again and again and again!
I also feel a strong desire to contribute to the greater good for both society and other programmers, but part of it is also the desire to be able to work for any company and be able to start with a nice well-understood framework and not have to rebuild.
That same inherent dislike for duplication of effort (read laziness!) that leads you to build nice reusable modules you can call on later in other code, also drives one to produce code you know by license can be called on at other companies. Work done on that system can be contributed back to the project. (I do contribute changes to GPL code I alter for work back to the project).
So in essence along with an altruistic result and goal is something of a slightly selfish nature, in that it helps make my life easier - so much the better if it makes other peoples lives easier as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Think about it: geeks write code.
Geeks would rather write code than market, distribute, sell, and support code that has already been written.
In other words, the process of extracting money from others for your code takes up time and energy that could be better spent writing MORE code!
In the most negative sense, salesmen are nothing but parasites on those who actually produce something. And who wants to be a parasite? ESPECIALLY when what you would be selling (software) can be reproduced infinately, at will, at virtually zero cost, and without your involvement?
R.H.
I'm speaking only for myself, unlike others who seem to think they know my motivations as well as everybody elses.
When I still had time, the reasons were quite simply the following:
- I wanted to write the software in any case, even if I was the only one using it, because it was enjoyable and there was some need for it
- I specifically did not want to sell it (too much work)
- If what I had made was useful to others, that's all the better
With a world population of 6000000000+ people the question is why aren't more people writing open source software?
All it takes is the most statistically insignificant fraction of the population with the weirdest and most obscure of reasons to write the software once and then it can be copied millions of times.
The commercial world is still coming to terms with the fact that if copying is made cheap (ie. no per-copy licensing) then massive efficiencies happen.
That's the beautiful thing about so-called "intellectual property" and it's time the law recognised that fact. Everybody wins.
My second reason is that I find the public development process superior. Having two persons studying your code is better than having just one. Having four is twice as good. And so on. There is always some person somewhere with expert knowledge on an esoteric subject. There are people with specific skills, and there are people with specific interests, such as documenting, testing, logistics or herding.
I find that mere information transparency is a good reason by itself -- and it's a philosophy that pervades much of the technological foundation of the net. I can test a POP3 server with a telnet client. I can tunnel XML-RPC through Apache. I can feed my favourite news server into a mailing list with GNU Mailman. I can harvest my favourite web sites onto my hard drive and postprocess it. And so on. Openness tends to breed openness.
There are other personal incentives for developing such software -- receiving the admiration of one's peers, developing one's technical skills, interacting with interesting people, finding new technical challenges, the structural aesthetics of a well-organized project, etc. Many of these incentives are present in "closed" projects (by which I mean any project where the source is publicly divulged). However, if recognition and ego expansion is one's goal, closed projects won't offer much relief.
Nothing to do with altruism. I'm lazy, I like to get something for nothing and with Open Source, I'm onto a good thing.
Lets say my boss wants me to solve some problem using software.
First of all, I don't go out and re-implement the wheel. Only an idiot would do that. I look round for something that someone else has done that solves most of what I need.
Then I take all of the hard work that they've done and I do any code fixes or customisations that I need for my own purposes, then I take credit for it all with my boss. I also give my updates back to the original author since I've already made the changes and I might as well. If he likes them, he'll include them. Hell, if he includes them, it means we don't have to make the changes again next time - less work for me.
If when I look round, there's nothing which does what I need then it means that I just have to write the code - that's work - Bummer.
However, I know that if I put my code up on a web site and publicise it to other developers, they might also need to do what I need to, they can download the code and use it, after all, I've written it already, no skin off my nose.
The cool thing is, they debug it for me! Is that cool or what? I get other people to do my work for me. All I have to do is fix the bugs or apply their patches. If it becomes *really* popular, I can sit back and take all the glory from the management for doing nothing!
Deleted
Free/Open Source software grows in proportion to network connectivity.
As I grew up, I got tired of stealing software
Some of my earliest memories involve my father running a Pirate BBS on his Commodore 64. As a child (Mind you, an 8yr old with leech access on one of the biggest warez boards in SoCal), pirating software was THE ONLY WAY of getting it, anyone who actually paid for it was lame. And it continued like this for some years, even after I got my first PC.
My sophomore & junior years of highschool brought with them several major developments:
These three events were all hopelessly intertwined. Of course, I was still using windows and pirating software, but was slowly sliding towards using Linux and free software. I've been dual-booting since then, slowly using more Linux and less Windows.
At some point when Linux had become my primary OS, and I had finally regained confidence in my intellectual capabilities (an irrelevant drug abuse themed chapter of my life), I began to realize that I could contribute something back to the community.
I guess it's partly because there's a greater sense of community in creating software than stealing it (the 'net killed the warez community), partly out of sentimental attachment (these days it's more the ideal that she represents than any longing for her as a person) and partly a moral conviction (I hate the idea of being forced to pay for software) that I use & contribute to open-source software.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Having an outsider find and report a bug is usually a much happier situation than having in-house users encounter the same bug while conducting our business.
For more details, see my essay: Free Software: Solving the Buy/Build Dilemma.
Developing free software brings discontentment, angst and bore. Discontentment before you publish it because you feel you would write it more quickly if you were not so lazy. Angst when you publish it because you're afraid people will notice how incompetent you are. Bore because, several months later, people keep asking you for feature enhancements and you don't care about that little piece of code any more.
This could apply to many areas, but think about it. People like recognition, people like to show off their creations. At least some people.
Throw in a dose of "in your face" to those "bastards who try to charge us for copying a disk", and you've got a couple of the ingredients for open source.
I don't understand why people write code that's NOT open source. Open source doesn't mean you can't make money on your work- nor does the GPL. Most proprietary software doesn't make money anyway- the business goes bust, the developers don't get paid, all the money gets consumed in advertising etc. The only difference is writers of proprietary software often have to work on stuff they don't want to do and can't tell anyone about it even it's their best work ever.
Justin
When you get right down to it, I think the answer is simpler than most that have been suggested. Many people just have a need to feel a sense of accomplishment and something they can call their own. When I go to work I knock off code or design circuits or whatever, but I do it for someone else at someone else's whim and fancy. And I have to follow their rules, however stupid or inane. And I have to do it along with whatever other tasks they decide I should do.
My code written on my time to do my tasks the way I want them done. It's the New Millenium (tm), high tech version of the artisan or craftsman.
http://www.wikipedia.com/
I do it to share my knowlege, impress my friends, and because I feel that I can afford to give in this way.
I think that there are many reasons that we give programs to society.
a. To explore new ideas, try new things. Scientists research things, not out of some motive to make millions, or to be memorized by future school children, but because they never lost their sense of curiosity of how the world works. They are attempting to understand something that they find interesting. Programmers sometimes do things just to see what is possible with computers.
b. To educate. We hope to teach the upcoming generations what we have learned, so that they do not have to bang their heads against the walls that we did. They can find newer and more interesting things to try.
c. To create a Discussion. We want to talk with our fellow programmers about a specific problem, idea, theory, thought, daydream, etc. We want/need their thoughts. Often by getting a fresh look at something we can find a solution.
d. To make money. We try to make money by adding value (service, support). We have to eat.
e. To better society. Society depends on everyone contributing a part of the whole. Without some brave men over two hundred years ago the U.S. would not exist. They worked because they saw that the things that they gave up (time, energy) would benefit us all by creating a free (speech) society.
f. Why not.
The darker side would be that by promoting OpenSource we are creating a market for our skills as consultants - especially since it appears that OS requires more highly skilled techs to use it. That makes us like the crack dealer who gives free samples then, once you're hooked, starts charging.
These are both pretty cynical, but, as people who follow politics know, you got to follow the money
If we look at this without the means of distibution provided by the internet, it really becomes a very simple question.
Why did some guy build himself a tool rack, a shed, a white picket fence? The answer is simple, because it adds value to his house, garage, whatever. Now give this same person the ability to at the touch of a button create a duplicate item for his brother, neighbor, friend, or coworker, and ask him whether or not he would share. I'd say a very large majority would share. That's open source. Not so difficult to understand really.
-milo
I try to keep others from experiencing the same computer pain I've gone through. This means I produce more phone calls and less code, but I can live with it.
-Paul Komarek
Palestinians hail Bin Laden, fire with joy at anti-US attacks AFP Nablus, West Bank, September 11, 19:55 ome 2,000 Palestinians on Tuesday celebrated, chanting slogans in honour of suspected terrorist Osama Bin Laden following a string of apparent terror attacks in the United States. Dozens of Palestinian refugees fired into the air with joy on Tuesday at the news, reports said. Guerrillas in military fatigues from various factions fired assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades into the air in the Ain Al-Helweh refugee camp at the outskirts of the southern port city of Sidon, one correspondent said. Camp residents, some still in pyjamas, interrupted afternoon rests to rush down to the streets and fire assault rifles into the air, they said. At the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, Palestinian fighters also went out to the streets as soon as they heard the news from their television sets to fire into the air with joy, an AFP correspondent said.