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Economic Slump hits Open Source
adamjone writes: "C|NET and Yahoo! are running a story about the hit that open source software is taking during this economic slump. Open source development is a hobby for me, not my full-time job. I find that I have more time to work on my project during times when my full-time job is slow, or we don't have enough work. Is open source truly being driven by those who make it their full-time occupation? If so, is there a happy medium for keeping bread on the table and still working within the open source community?" At least Microsoft is doing well.
It can't be. Has any open source company ever turned an actuall profit? GAAP or pro forma? Truth is it's like any other new business. 95% of the new companies will close their doors within the first three years and the survivors will probably survive for a while because they have good management and a real business model.
Sure, there are some smaller and lesser known open source programs out there. Heck, lots of little solitaire games and remakes of Breakout (Arkanoid, for you young 'uns) are released under the GPL. But those are not the programs that give open source it's high profile. We're talking about:
1. Perl & Python
2. Apache
3. the Linux kernel
4. gcc
5. KDE
6. X
There are certainly commercial interests behind most of these, in that some people--not all--have full time jobs working on them. gcc especially wouldn't be anywhere near where it is today without the input of a number of large companies.
Because a lot of people are getting laid off their jobs, I'd expect Open Source to skyrocket. When the very few jobs actually start hiring, they'll want people that kept busy, and aren't going rusty. Not to mention you can show you're great coding style on open source projects (ie - during the interview, say "yeah, I wrote anim.h & anim.cpp, please open them up on the website and see how I animated this spline using the super-quick algorithm").
If you unemployed are smart, you'd log off of slashdot, and get your coding groove on.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
I worked for a company for a while that was as proud of the fact that it was creating (some) open source software as I was. Then it went under. Not because open source wasn't working for them, but because management spent all of the investors' money on renting halls to have company wide meetings, throwing parties, "business trips" to various places, etc, etc, etc.
Just because a company is wise to open source doesn't mean they're wise to good business practices.
OK, the article is actually interesting. Having founded JBoss Group, a commercial entity behind JBoss I relate to many of the points.
But somehow the thinking is backwards still, thinking with old filters. One of the fundamental flaws of business in open source is that you give away your core competency.
But then OSS existed before companies tried to grow on its ground (Linux) and very succesful service companies existed independently of Open Source (EDS). So there must be a middle ground.
I believe part of the problem is that is that business folks out there (mostly VCs, I have met my share of arrogance back in the good ol days of the valley, confusion!) well VCs try to apply the old model of company building on the new way of producing software. It doesn't work. Open Source CANNOT support fat and overhead and corporate structures, just because IT CAN'T.
My (small) company is profitable and we are growing but I clearly see that I cannot AND SHOULD NOT grow with employees, just not flexible enough. As research on business plans goes, I understand that JBoss even though it is in the very rich field of enterprise software (and there is a lot of service), well JBoss for all its success cannot support a massive company right now. And again it is probably not the right structure ANYWAY. VCs got it wrong, most business men are scratching their heads, we at JBoss Group are trying, trying hard. Can't say we got it, we don't, but like many others in open source we make a living.
We offer many services around our free product are thinking about subscriptions and paying for information. The product is free, the service is not. The information is not (documentation, help, support, training (plug: http://www.jboss.org)).
Training is our biggest gig, people want to meet the developers of the framework. Also I don't think this would work with "GUI" frameworks. Just not enough customization to go by. If it is hard in the J2EE field, I can imagine how much harder it is in other fields.
Had I taken VC money (not that it was offered) or had I hired anybody left and right with borrowed money (what VC money is in the first place), well I WOULD BE DEAD TODAY.
It's a bitch out there, but I for one still believe, believe strong, we'll get it
marcf
The real mnf999 always posts as anonymous coward
The way I see it, there are two ways that this can be looked at. The knee-jerk paranoid reaction is that the rats are jumping ship, and the end of open source is looming just over the horizon. And it just might be true. Open source is a radical, untested business model, and as much as we slashdotters want it to succeed, it may just be a deeply flawed system that will never work long term and large scale. That's not the only way to read this, though, and I certainly hope a more positive view is the reality.
Every new industry goes through an initial period of boom, where everyone sees golden opportunities and jumps onboard. Eventually the market gets saturated with a lot of poorly conceived wannabes that jumped on, and it collapses under its own weight. When that happens, though, the market doesn't go away. Instead, the most solid competitors survive the collapse and come back stronger than ever.
So far, it seems that we are looking at the initial collapse right now and we can expect a few casualties. The survivors, though, will come back stronger than ever and take open source to the next level. Furthermore, open source has the unique advantage that the casualties don't disappear completely, but rather the failed companies' products live on due to their open nature.
When the big boys (IBM, Sun, SGI, etc.) with the resources to weather the storm start to jump ship, then I'll start to worry. Until then, I look at this as a sign that open source is ready to move to the next level.
"If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for everyone else."
Linus was also in university at the time, and we all know that university students have lots of time on their hands, and also not having to worry about the current economic climate.
Companies that pay employees to debug and add features to open source software, because they don't feel the need to reinvent the wheel just because they want two features that aren't in the original program.
Not having to buy licenses for much or all of the software on their un*x workstations saves departments huge amounts of money. Moreover, they can build workstations from commodity components. This allows them to provide more machines for students, and simultaneously exposes huge numbers of CS undergrads and grad students to free software.
Also, the dot-com bubble bursting caused CS graduate school enrollments to swell enormously. Grad schools have traditionally been places where much free software is born, as student researchers put their work out there for everyone to see.
The problem is that only a few schools really do research in user interfaces and similar areas that will advance free software in the mainstream. But in a lot of less visible areas: like the core-OS, distributed computing, networking, scientific computing, high-performance graphics, AI and robotics, free software will continue to progress and improve through universities. In the process the universities will continue to graduate students who are used to working with free software, and who will wonder why they should buy licenses for software when so much is available for free.
I was laid off ten years ago (when I was 30) and went out and started a company. I was doing okay, but the bills were racking up fast and I needed to stem the cash flow problem. I took a job that I have held ever since.
Where would I be had I kept the company going?
Who knows?
It might have panned out beautifully.
Risk can be a good thing.
If these people are willing to take a short-term risk and keep coding, they may actually be in a better position in the long term.
If you think that certainty comes with age, talk to me again in 10 years.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Are the capitalistic and communal fundamentally different, or aspects of a common creature? Consider our current 'capitalist' president. How did he get there? By being a part of three groups - the Yale-Harvard axis, the Texas-oil axis, and the Connecticut old-money WASP contingent - which look out for their communal interests. Those with wealth and power in our society generally get there by being communal with some significant group of their counterparts. It's how the capital is accumulated to allow for capitalism in the first place.
So the question for those of us in the computer trades is whether we can achieve a quality of communalism among ourselves that will make us a true center of economic and political power. In the 90s we were getting there, centered largely on new West Coast elites. Wall Street was threatened by this, so it blew it into a bubble in order to (1) take East Coast profits on it and (2) make it go away.
If we quit being communalist now we're being penny wise and pound foolish. Do we want real power down the line, or do we want to be the sadder sort of "honest tradesmen" who have to rent their basic tools before they go out to the jobsite?
Remember, capitalism isn't about being some mean-ass son-of-a-hound to all and sundry, capitalism is about accumulating capital. Tools are a form of capital, productive of future earnings. Sharing capital within your communal group is the proven method by which Bush gained shares in several oil companies and a baseball team. And it's why he will be so good at paying back his friends - these values run deep enough in his character that his friends were comfortable sharing their monetary piles with his campaign.
The bottom line is that computers can do tremendously productive work. Those who can make the computers do that work can always get a cut of it. We individually have more capital if our tools are better - and the more we can share this capital as a group, the more politically and economically powerful we become.
In the old European empires knowledge of trade routes was capital, to be merged with the monetary capital of those who'd - largely out of pursuing the communal interests of their class - collected and preserved it. In the new empires knowledge of computer routing is capital....
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Donations do not work. It is not a matter of convenience. This is well known from the shareware community. Ask ANY shareware author. The shareware community has been going a lot longer than the free software community and they have tried out every "easy-pay" strategy and know what works and what doesn't. The only thing that works (i.e. brings in money) is a time-limited version of the software which must be registered after 30 days or the application won't run.
To actually get donations you have to create moral pressure, which is unpleasant for both sides. Remember that most people routinely pirate commercial software, and don't care about blatantly breaking the law, let alone remunerating the author. Piracy is a serious crime, and businesses can be get a hefty fine for running unlicensed software. Nobody willingly pays, let alone donates without significant moral pressure, except in amounts so small that it is not worth the hassle. Ever see people begging in the street? That's the lifestyle you get from donations where there is a huge amount of moral pressure ("Hungry and homeless, will work for food, please help me"). Sure maybe a developer can get $10 or maybe $100, which might be useful for a student, but it's not really relevant for a professional developer w mortgage/family. Free sofware is "cool" but as someone once said "if I could pay my bills with 'cool' I would be well-set".
I don't want to be cruel here but people are basically selfish most of the time, and do not think about donating. You can give them paypal, fancy GTK applications, or stand in the street with a collecting box asking for money but people will try to avoid giving. After all, millions of people around the world are starving to death, or dying of easily curable diseases while we read slashdot, we know this, we have seen it on TV, but statistically speaking most of us (including me) don't donate much money to organisations that work to solve the problem. There's always an excuse. "Sorry I don't have any change", "How do I know the money won't be wasted?" , etc.
I am a free software developer, quite a lot of people use my software, and it is easy to donate money to me via paypal or ask me to make an enhancement for money, or hire me. I explicitly say this on my webpage. Nobody ever has, and I don't really expect them to. Most of the emails I get are complaints about something not working the way someone expects (usually because they haven't read the manual), or comments that underestimate the amount of work I put into the project, like "This package would have been much better if you had written it in <my favorite language>". Sometimes I get some emails that say "Great program!" but that's about it and that's all anyone can realistically expect. Maybe I did too good a job and made the software too reliable ;-)
I didn't have any illusions about this before I started writing the software, and my experience has confirmed what I expected. The only reward you can expect from writing free software is the satisfaction of seeing it being used, sometimes by people who don't know that they're using it, or simply knowing that you did a good job.
If you actually wanted to get donations you would have to start pressuring people who use software but don't donate, for example by implying they were "parasites" or calling them that, etc. This is exactly what happened in communist countries where people were supposed to donate their labour to society for the good of all. I don't really think it's a good idea to introduce it into free software, even if there is some truth in it.
I'm being an A/C because I don't think the specifics matter here.
1. When I was out of work I could dedicate 40+ hours at a time to opensource development. Over 100 hours a week. now that I working I'm lucky to spend 20 hours a week.
2. If the economy is slow then companies should be looking for the most bang for the buck. Not, $1000-$5000 per seat in desktop licensing (and much more on servers). Smaller budgets make for smarter purchases due to increased research into value, reliability, and performance, The 3 areas where Linux and opensource dominate.
It depends on how you define the term open source. You hint at this in the paragraph that follows.
When you write in the first paragraph that open source will "quietly, undignifiably [sic], dissapear [sic]" but then write in this paragraph that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain," you are implying that the most important aspect of open source is "making money and supplanting a capitalistic machine." I'm more than a little confused as to how making money could possibly help supplant a capitalistic machine but I'm assuming that you meant something more like "supplanting the capitalistic machine based on proprietary software with one based on open source software." Well, perhaps it is an important element of what many people mean when they use the term open source as a conscious decision to avoid the term free software. In other words, I think that some people who use the term open source, e.g. Eric Raymond, invented the term specifically to describe the socio-economic concept of making money from non-proprietary software. So, what if we talk about free software, i.e. open source software without the libertarian, capitalist spin? Will free software disappear? You yourself even wrote that "Linux the kernel, and any derivatives [...] will remain." Not only Linux but GNU, BSD, et al, will remain for quite a long time. In this sense, how is free software failing? If I want to use software that I am free to copy, modify, and share with the community, I can still do it. Was this not the original aim of the FSF and the GNU project? Larry Wall can still keep providing Perl. I can still look at all of the source code to BSD and W. Richard Steven's TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 2 is as free to publish all the gory details of the BSD implementation of the TCP/IP stack today as it was when he first wrote it. How are any of these things failures for free software?
Personally, I think that free software will continue to flourish in the same way that it has always flourished, e.g. as a free exchange of ideas communicated with source code in the grand tradition of a academic community. Perhaps the views of those who supported the idea, for example, of "Open Source as a Business Strategy" might have try and buttress their arguments in the light of economic realities. Of course, if some of these open source businesses might even manage to survive the current economic downturn and come out strong on the upturn. However, for those who think that one can see "Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research", the particular market woes of any .bomb have little, if any, relevance. And what could possible interfere with Larry Wall's idea of open source development as an exercise in "Diligence, Patience, and Humility"?