Open Source, Closed Documentation?

sunset asks: "Recently I was motivated to look at WebGUI which looks like a pretty cool open source project. However I was having trouble making it work with Red Hat 8.0 which includes Apache 2.0. This seems like a reasonable thing to want, as Red Hat 8 has been out since September and Apache 2 has been publicly released for close to a year. Checking the WebGUI community discussion forum, I found that someone else had already inquired about this. Following the rest of the thread, you learn that the product's vendor considers this information to be proprietary, and that you must pay $50 to join their Support Forum to get the information. It gets better. The associated Membership Agreement for the Support Forum includes the clause 'You shall not to share [sic] the information contained herein with any other party.' So if I join up, I am locked out of sharing valuable information with the open source community about how to install this open source product. In the end I found out what I needed to know without giving up my rights or my hard-earned bucks, but frankly this attitude from the vendor pisses me off. Am I alone in this? What do you think?"

Comments

Open Docs can be made

[synq]

And that is exactly what we are working on at WebGUI.nl.

Ten ways to make money from free software

[MAXOMENOS]

Well, since you asked:

1. You can charge for documentation. O'Reilly does this for Perl, and you may notice, they don't include NDAs saying that you can't teach the information in those books to other people.
2. You can charge for priority support (phone calls returned within an hour -- or 15 minutes or 10 minutes).
3. You can charge for access to a high-speed, high-bandwidth update server, like Ximian does.
4. You can charge for training.
5. You can charge for certification.
6. You can charge for the right to include your product in closed-source products, like Trolltech or MySQL AB do.
7. You can charge to add new features.
8. You can charge for someone to come over there and install it.
9. Hell, you can even charge for the software itself .. Red Hat's advanced server product is GPL, all the components are available online, and companies STILL pay several thousand dollars for the product.
10. Finally, you can charge money for the hardware, like IBM does with its Linux-using mainframes and microframes.

Good Lord

[finkployd]

I've never seen so many people so horribly confused.

For everyone who is running off at the mouth saying "You greedy open source people, this is how they are supposed to make money, paying for support is fine, stop demanding everying for free, etc", wake up and actually read the article.

Nobody is complaining that they are charging for documentation or support. The problem here is they are making their customers basically sign an NDA that prevents them for sharing any knowledge they gain from the documentation with others. This has nothing to do with copyrights, and it is nothing like photocopying a manual. This is about you promising to never help anyone you know who has the same software. Microsoft does not sue me if I tell you a Windows XP trick I read about in a book by Microsoft Press.

Personally, I don't hold this against the webGUI people. It is their right if they want to do it, but damn, what a crappy business model. That will only provide them with a revenue stream until some code savvy customers write their own documentation from the source code (which from other posts looks like it has already happened)

So really there is nothing to see here folks. Just another company trying yet another flawed way to make money using open source software.

As to the broader topic everyone seems to be bringing up about how this is a fatal flaw in open source (namely that companies cannot figure out how to make money off it), there is no problem. Nobody cares if companies can figure out how to make money off of every tiny little open source project out there. The larger ones have funding from companies that use them (IBM funds Apache and some others) and the rest are written by people in their spare time or as part of their job.

I make money with open source software by using it to solve my company's (well, university's) problems. I also make enhancements to various packages we use and feed them back to the community. Everyone benefits and I still get paid.

If you are a programmer who thinks you should be getting a six figure salary because you can write a little software utility, then cries when the open source community makes a better one for free, tough luck. Either evolve with the times or get left behind. The days when you can whip out a little program and charge for it are done. If it is truely a good program, you can bet someone else will be motivated to reimplement the concept as an open source project. It may not have happened yet (Gimp is not a complete replacement for Photoshop for example) but over time it will.

Finkployd

Re:Well...

[bwt]

Ummmm, excuse me, but if you're a contractor, and I hire you to write something, that's a work for hire.

No, that is 100% wrong. Copyright in a work done by an independent contractor is by default owned by the contractor. The contract may assign copyright ownership if the agreement is explicit, but even then it is not usually a "work for hire", but rather a transfer of copyright ownership. A contractor's work can only be a work for hire by agreement in 9 specifically enumerated cases that do not include software.

There was a Supreme Court case in the 1980's on the copyright differentiation between the independent contractor vs. work for hire.