For The Love Of Open Source

Jim Madison writes: "Is the open source movement about the joy of hacking? The latest edition of FirstMonday has an interesting academic study that says "No!", it is only natural in our traditional political economy that software be developed with public funding in the safety of academia when the markets are immature. Have moved into a post-scarcity gift culture or is the report correct that open source uses and needs the subsidy of public investment to grow within traditional industrial capitalism?"

Comments

I'd say OSS is popular due to being FS usually

[Anonymous Coward]

I've asked a lot of people and it seems to me that most people who evangelize and use OSS are using it because OSS projects are usually (but not always) free software (as in free beer not free-dom). Why did Loki fall into trouble? Because the million linux kids out there use linux because its free of cost and wouldn't spend a dime to keep a great company alive. As such, I think OSS is failing...

Making open source work: desire AND opportunity

[Artifice_Eternity]

I'm no economist, and can't pretend to have fully understood the technical jargon in this piece. (But that won't stop me from posting about it on Slashdot... ;) )

It seems to me there are two factors in the creation of open source projects:

• Need/desire, and
• Opportunity.

Many open source programmers (Linus, the guy who started PHP, and others) say they set out simply to "scratch an itch." This is the desire/need that underlies so much of what's been done...a small number of individuals who have a burning idea, and who start making it happen for their own reasons.

But not all programmers are free to spend endless time and money on their pet ideas. If you have a very tolerant and generous employer or a lot of free time (and no spouse/girlfriend/boyfriend), I guess that helps. But it also helps if you are working in an environment -- university, gov. agency, etc. -- where the prevailing values support your work.

I.e., in a for-profit company, you are unlikely to get official recognition/resources for your open source work. But in an academic or government setting, where profit is less important than the usefulness of the software, you may well be able to pursue your personal "itch" with the backing of the institution.

Just my $0.02...

the truth about open source

[psyklopz]

you can't label it as being done purely for joy or purely for economic reasons.

some people do it for the love of the art.

some people do it to make a political statement about our economic system.

some people do it as pure research to benefit the body of knowledge in the software development field.

to try to say that all open source software is done for reason X is a little shortsighted.

It's precisely that type of linear thinking that makes other people say 'open source is communism' or 'open source can be taken seriously because it's done as a hobby'.

as with anything in life, the motivations for any one movement are so complex that pinning them down is something of an impossible task.

Hmmmm...

[Otter]

I _think_ his argument is that free software developers are motivated not by altruism, as journalists frequently claim, or by the desire for ego gratification, as Eric Raymond frequently states (in his typically pretentious way and frequently including the suggestion that coding can get you laid) but by economic self-interest. Working on free projects can help create a reputation and a portfolio that can help you make money, and developers in countries who are forgoing less money by concentrating on free projects therefore are more likely to do so.

Interestingly, he picked GNOME and Linux as the projects to analyze -- had he used KDE instead of GNOME the numbers would have come out much more strongly in favor of his hypothesis.

I dunno, though -- I do it for fun, not because I expect any financial gain from it.

$0.02 from an academic

[s20451]

I agree that academia tends to support open source software, which has several reasons, in my experience. Firstly, academics are accustomed to peer review, and are comfortable with the notion that inspection by an independent expert tends to improve research. Secondly, academics' livelihoods depends directly on the scientific and not the commercial significance of their work. Most academics have an awareness that their salary is paid for by the generosity of government and industry, who (usually) don't expect anything specific in return; this leads to a desire to give something tangible back (such as the software that results from a research project). Finally, it is usually true that the software produced by academics is not important in itself; instead, it is the idea behind the software that academics want to promulgate; releasing the source code is the quickest way to spreading this idea.

Personally, I release my simulation software in the hope that another researcher continuing my work won't have to waste six months writing his/her own software from scratch.

The raw data

[truthsearch]

Since many will post without actually reading the study, everyone should note that the raw data came only from the kernel and GNOME. I doubt that kernel+GNOME developers make up the majority of open source developers. And I wouldn't consider it an accurate sample set of developer's either. Kernel hackers are a special breed, to say the least. And GNOME developers certainly don't completely encompass the average application developer, such as command-line, internet, or just plain x-window.

I'm an open source application developer (in my personal time), and find this study does not at all include my perspective. Obviously I'm not the majority, but I think it's missing a lot.

No way

[conan_albrecht]

This discussion comes up on Slashdot every couple of months or so.

The article's assumptions might be true for some people, but there are still many, many people who still develop out of love for doing something useful. In fact, there are probably more today because the Internet has allowed people to contribute and connect that never could before. The network effect has been made possible by the Internet.

I develop open source software because, yes, I do love it and I want to do something useful. One of the primary reasons I got a PhD and live an academic life is so I can do this and still support my family. I have must students contribute to my projects as part of their assignments, as well. Many of them have gotten the open source bug and are contributing now as well.

I develop open source because:

1. I don't want to support it. Let people find usefulness in it. Let them contribute as well. But I don't want to spend 80 percent of my waking hours solving naive questions.

2. I don't want the risk that comes with marketing software for money. I don't want to risk my livelihood by starting a business to support my software, either. Really marketing something takes 3-5 good years of your life to do it right, and it involves risk.

3. Yes, I like to help people and I benefit from what they contribute. I'm not anal about having to have GNU software only, but I do support what they do. I feel like I am giving back to the common pool when I develop open source apps.

4. I am not a competitive person. In fact, I absolutely dislike it. I prefer to develop a useful app to the best of my abilities. I find joy in the fact that if someone else solves the same problem I do, we can e-mail each other and combine our efforts and be friendly to each other rather than compete and try to drive one another out of business. Everyone benefits when we work together.

Disclaimer: I am not socialist. I love free and open economies. IMHO, competitive business economies are the best thing we've come up with yet. They keep people honest. But in those economies, there is plenty of room for community-welfare ideas as well.

fun, ego, professional satisfaction, ...

[bcrowell]

The article quotes Eric Raymond,

• "The 'utility function' Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible [product] of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers."

and then says

• While this may be a rational-choice explanation (it seems to assume that individuals are goal-oriented actors who rank-order their preferences), it is far from an economic one [5]. By portraying developers as driven at least in part by "intangible" desires, Raymond undermines the most critical assumption of classical theory: that all actions have a quantifiable opportunity cost, and that individuals can consequently act in ways that maximize their material welfare [6]. In other words, although his argument is couched in the language of economics, Raymond implicitly suggests that open source development occurs outside of the market.

In other words, if Linus Torvalds says he does it just for fun, he must be lying because fun is hard for an economist to quantify. Likewise if Eric Raymond says he does it for ego, he must be lying, based on the same reasoning. Personally, I write open-source textbooks because I hated all the choices from the big publishers -- my motivation is my own professional satisfaction and maximizing the enjoyment of the work I do as a teacher. But don't believe me. I must be lying, because professional satisfaction and enjoyment are hard for economists to measure.

If we don't want to admit that fun is an economic motivator, then why do people go to Las Vegas to gamble? They lose money on the average, but the point is that it's fun.

The author doesn't make his point very clearly, but he seems to be saying that there is more open-source development per capita outside the US because programmers in the US can make loads of money, so they want to do that instead of relaxing with a nice free software project. OK, so there are differences in the amounts of money lost by doing free software, but what do these people gain by doing free software? The author only seems to want to talk about the loss, because the gain is cultural and personal, and hard to measure. But if he believes the gain doesn't exist, then why doesn't open-source software development cease immediately?

We are Marxists

[XBL]

Hasn't it been obvious? Open-source developers are Marxists, working towards a common good, trying to move software development along to benefit everyone.

If Carl Marx were alive today, he would probably be astounded. His ideas have lead to failed societies, and much suffering. Yet his ideas prevail among a group of geeks working in capitalists societies, collaborating all over the world.

I think that it's only possible to be a partial Marxist. I develop open-source software because other people are developing software that I use for free. They use mine for free in return. However every other aspect of my life is capitalist, and I am cool with that.

One thing that will be interesting is to see how open-source affects the software industry over the long term. States are proposing that Microsoft spill out the source code for some of their products, and also Micrsoft has the lame shared source thing going on. These are baby steps towards a big revolution, IMHO.