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."

Comments

Many Reasons....

[scotch]

This is a complicated question - there are many reasons. When I wrote Emacs back in '73, I was only trying to recreate an editor I was used to that was usurped by a greed corporation. This met with some success and community approval, which drove me to devote more of my time to free software. When I wrote BSD (and all the clones), I personally needed a nice secure networking operating system - little did I know that others would use my OS in Mission Critical enterprises. This was quite a stoke to my ego. At this point, I was beginning to get the hang of the game: write good software - get a natural endorphin high. Like a cloned white lab mouse, I was hooked. During the late '70s and '80s, I turned my attention to a myriad of small projects: GCC, make, awk, sed, vi, MSDos. All of these met with some moderate success, but they lacked the punch of my earlier successes. I needed a bigger score. Then I hit upon it: a unix for the masses! Early in the '90s I began this project which I titled GNU/Linux. Much to my pleasure, GNU/Linux met with huge success. From there, the rest is histrory. I wrote a nice free Web Browser called Mozilla (after my cat Mozzy) which out shone all competitors, I started a Desktop Environment for my various Unix projects which I dubbed 'KDE'. Later, I realized this was a poor name and started a completely different Desktop project called 'GNOME' - by this time I had developed a particular affinity for the letter 'g' (not to mention common $3 crack!). Where do I go from here? Well I have a few projects in the hopper - one is called OS X which is a derivative of my earlier BSD work. There are others that I'd rather save as a surprise (a hint: one contains the initials 'XP'). Hope this helps your interview.

Richard Stallman

Re:Alternatives to money?

[jswitte]

Well, yes that is a possibility. But say if I wanted to develop under BSD, that means that I could not use any code that is GPL. This means I might have to reinvent the wheel, and we all hate having to do that.. And from a cursory look at source code out there (very cursory, I'm not 'involved' in the open-source community at all), there appears to be a LOT more GPL code out there than BSD.

On the corporate side, these points about the GPL DO matter. For example, there was a big discussion on the IBM ViaVoice for Linux list recently (past six months) about whether ViaVoice could be GPLd. The upshot was that IBM didn't want to because they'd loose their IP protection (which one must admit, does matter. After all, their programmers do have to eat, and if the people at M$ or MacSpeech could get their code "free" they could make their products better possibly and then ViaVoice could lose out in the marketplace, except for things like market-penetration, etc, which is WAY of the scope of this rant) One person of the VV list pointed out that some open-source developers will not use code that is not GPLd, as a moral issue. This rules out using ViaVoice.

If we want more people to use/develop/release open-source software, a system needs to be worked out where the traditional software-business can continue, to a point. IMO, what we need is some intermediate case between GPL-totally-open and traditional-softwre-market-totally-closed-forever models needs to be developed. If you choose to use GPL code (see above), and you want to get paid, you basically are relying on the generosity of strangers, although I suppose you could sell a precompiled binary, and then just have the source files available on-line (as per the clause in the GPL that you must either provide the source OR provide a place to get it). This on the assumption that most joe's aren't going to take the trouble to download your source, perhaps reconfigure their compiler (if they have one), and make it themselves (do you have to include makefiles/project files, or just the code?)

An interesting question that just occurred to me is that if you use GPL code in a project, are you allowed to dual-release you code under GPL and BSD? Could someone then licenses your BSD code or app (for a fee perhaps, but with the source closed)?

Of course, most software under GPL would be sold as shareware anyway (if not for the GPL virality). And where with GPL you have the (potential) risk that someone will download you're code and compile it without paying you for a precompiled binary (if you chose that route), with shareware they just might not pay you at all.