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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?"
considering the only way for them to make money is to charge for support, this makes sense to me
I thought this was how open source companies were supposed to make their money? You get the software for free, but you have to pay for support.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
I think it's completely asinine that a company thinks it can charge a fee for a product or service they provide.
Greedy bastards!
Well, now that you've found out, write a HOWTO and contribute it to the LDP. This will undercut their revenue stream and teach them that trade secrets won't protect them in a world where they publish the source ... wait ... I MAY have made an unwarranted assumption that there are people who will READ a HOWTO ...
utter rubbish
Inline WYSIWYG content editors. Built in editor (IE Only), and integrated support for Real Objects Edit-On Pro.
Wow, IE-specific features. Good to see that stupidity crosses all license barriers.
"and 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, am I locked out of sharing valuable information with the open source community about how to install this open source product? "
No, you're just limited from spreading information around for free that they own.
If you wrote a book, would you want people copying it and giving it away for free outside Barnes + Noble?
Not a solution for the original poster, obviously, unless they have a lot more time than I do. Still, it could save the next guy's bacon, and discourage what seems to me a rather underhanded letter-not-the-spirit implementation.
I love doing documentation. Too bad I can't program my way out of a batch file.
Every company needs some sort of motivation for creating Open Source software.
:)
I'd hate to state the obvious, but if you want to make the opensource community attractive... there needs to be money involved somehow.
RedHat charges for support, some charge for documentation. Aside from the hobbiests out there, you expect large companies to throw away time and money into opensource, and getting NOTHING in return by making everything 100% free?
Did you really expect a free lunch? You know the saying I hope
--Zuchini
This is a way that companies are getting around the gpl, lgpl, et al... I am not surprised by this tactic at all. With the economy the way it is, IT spending is at a near all time low. Companies scrambling for survival are going to use any and every dirty trick in the book. A previous post at the right of it. Post a review with the 20% relevant info and dump the rest. Reverse it on them. They use the law to get around issues they don't like or that affect the bottom line (read Cable Companies), so why not us?
Your actions in life will determine your children's future.
You know, charging for support is one thing. I can understand the need to generate revenue by having people pay for service.
This however is a whole other issue. What they have in their license agreement is "You shall not to share the information contained herein with any other party."
Sounds to me that if they help you resolve a technical issue in the forums then you can not share that resolution with any other person. Not on IRC, not with a person in the cube next to you, not in USENET...nowhere!
These guys do have a reasonable expectation to be able to profit off their inventions. Many linux distros encourage you to pay for support, how is this any different from them requiring you to pay for the manual?
;)
Since it is open source, one could argue that all the documentation you could possibly need is already available to you.. just read the source.
Is it a little underhanded, yes. But there's nothing terribly unethical about it.
Depending on the license of the software (site is already too hosed for me to find it myself), there's nothing stopping you from forking your own branch of the source, documenting that, and continue on your merry way.
JBoss follows this same idea. The software is open source but the documentation must be paid for. I don't disagree with this because its a business model supporting open source that may work. To JBoss's credit, they do offer a basic manual for free.
1;
Quoting Sarah from the list:
Of course, selling the manual is a completely different matter. What they're doing isn't selling the manual; they're selling the manual and then telling you that you can't share the information.
These guys are shooting themselves in the foot. The main strength of open-source software is that open source empowers the user community. By segmenting the user community into those who pay vs. those who don't, one hobbles a large segment of the user community. It doesn't help, either, that someone publicized their behavior on Slashdot.
I certainly hope they "get it," sharpish.
Finding God in a Dog
Perl works on a similar model. Larry Wall gets paid by O'Reilly & Assoc. to maintain perl. He adds new features, releases the code for free, and everyone's happy. The only stipulation is that O'Reilly gets first crack at the new documentation for their Perl books. I own several O'Reilly books and they're worth their weight in gold. I'm also happy to know that by purchasing these books, I'm supporting OSS coders.
Frankly, this article, as well as almost all of the Ask Slashdots in recent memory, are no longer questions. They've become "I had a bad experience with (my employer, a company, a developer, you name it) and I want to build a little bad PR to get back at them". Ask Slashdots have become just a place to bitch, not a place to ask questions.
This really is a shame, because the idea of Ask Slashdot is very valuable. Editors simply should not let articles that are not *questions* through. Articles that contain one long string of complaints about someone followed by a random "question" tacked on the end to make it fit the format do not count.
May we never see th
I fully agree...if a company won't give me the product for free and then support it for free, then I'm not going to not give them any more of my money.
Seriously, if open source is going to thrive (not merely survive) then corporations will have to take it up and that will require making money off of it somehow. If the only way this company sees to make money off this product is by selling the documentation, then they need to make sure they don't just sell one copy. If you have a problem with this, then to me that is an indictment of the feasibility of the open source model...not an indictment of the company that just wants to make a profit (or at least break even).
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
Stallman has been talking about this for some time. Although he's talking about free software and not open source software, the idea is the same.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
Agree to nothing. Study the source, write your own documentation, and release it under GNU FDL.
The beauty of open source is, you can't get away with keeping secrets for very long.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Oh wait...I never did spend any money with them.
The biggest problem with open source as I see it is an entitlement mentality that just because someone wrote something cool, I should be able to use it for free. Being a developer that owns my own company, I have found this amazing realization that I need food. It's really a good thing. And to get food, I need money. Therefore I exercise my rights under the laws of this country to charge people to use my hard work to make their lives easier, and send me money so I can eat dinner. It's really quite a convinent arragement that has worked for quite a while.
I find that these guys have struck on something ingeneous, and have actually been reading the reports on the practical problems of Open Source software in the marketplace. The biggest problem is support. You need to have a team of experts on staff to deal with it, because M$ won't come out and fix it for you. This is really expensive from a resource point of view, because you then have to cover the HR costs of these people even when they're sitting idle, because you will need them in a pinch. Dumb arrangement. Therefore charging for support is absolutely ingeneous, and is a great model, I think. INCLUDING the documentation. We happen to give away ours for free, and charge for licensing in commercial products. We are looking at a QT type dual-license model so that we can stay in buisness. For all their detractors, I want everyone to notice that they are still in buisness. And important point since if you're laying cable with a bunch of Mexicans, you find yourself too tired to program.
Software is inherently expensive to produce. Open source has been subsidised through tax dollars via the university system (student loans, grants, etc). Before you bitch about people having to pay for software, why don't you think about the fact that people who don't have crap to do with Linux, etc, had to pay for it's construction...
And that is exactly what we are working on at WebGUI.nl.
sig not found
Not everything can be free... if you think it can, then write it all yourself. And, no, writing a text editor in PHP/MySQL (apparently the preferred combination for *any* programming project on Slashdot) will not work. (Before you flame, I am certain that such a beast exists, although it does seem a bit ridiculous to me). Do you realize that corporations are doing you a *favor* when they release products under an OSS model? Do you realize the huge amounts of money it takes for a commercial entity to create quality software? Do you realize what a fight it is to get something open sourced in a corporation?
Please don't take all of this for granted. Corporations are there to make money (hell, *people* are here to make money) and they have a right to do so.
Since when does being open source mean that everything's free? Or that you're entitled to get everything for free? Redhat has commercial services they charge for, same with MySQL. What's the difference? Sure charging for documentation may not be the most warm and fuzzy thing in the world, but that's their decision and right. You don't have to use their software, and I'm sure there's a lot of other places to go for support (Google and Google Groups, as examples).
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
The assertion of the Open Source movement has always been that software companies should not charge for software, but that they should make money by "selling support".
Well, it's not support they should be selling, but convenience. Because what is support? The manuals. Access to people who know how to use the product, etc. But if "information is free" then the manuals should be freely copyable and distributable. And you can always go to usenet for access to people who know the product. But paid-for support doesn't get you access to unique information (an oxymoron), it gets you more convenient, quicker, access to the expertise. So in effect, you're paying for convenience. Just like people pay for the convenience (or status?) of having 20 ounces of water in a plastic bottle (rather than having to walk to the nearest drinking fountain for free).
This company needs to realize that they're not selling information. They're selling convenience. If they want to go the "selling information" route, they may as well become closed-source and proprietary.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Well, since you asked:
Finding God in a Dog
Some projects on SourceForge (OpenCV comes to mind) use Yahoo Groups for their discussions, which is annoying. Yahoo is making its "customers" sign more and more restrictive agreements, they spam, and they put ads in the middle of the forums of others. It's time to move such discussions to SourceForge's own forum system, or to Netnews, rather than using Yahoo, with their "interruption-based advertising".
Certainly you're not allowed to make photocopies of O'Reilly books and hand those out to others, but you aren't prohibited from sharing the information within. The expression is protected, the information is not. If I ask you a perl question, you're allowed to look up the answer in your O'Reilly book and answer me. If you ask me the plot of a movie I've seen, I'm allowed to tell you even if you haven't paid to see the movie.
In this case, the
sounds pretty far out, almost NDA-like.An NDA for information about an "open source" project, is something I haven't heard of before.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The support forum agreement could turn into a moneymaker for the lawyers if it was ever battled out in court. They can protect trade secrets. But how can information about how to make software work be a trade secret when every detail of the software's operation is already published in source form under an open source license? That won't walk. They can copyright their presentation of the information, but they can't prevent you from telling others how to make the software work. If they could, you would bet that, for example, MS would have a similar clause in their license that made the whole Windows for Bozos book industry illegal.
You could download a binary copy of Blender for free, but if you wanted their manual it was $57 US. I bought the manual (VERY beautifully done, but smelled funny), not because I needed it, but more to support them. Apparently enough downloaders didn't buy the manual. Now, however, Blender is OpenSource. I haven't checked to see what kind of documentation the OpenSource version of Blender supplies.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Consider what the IEEE does with standards like POSIX. Lots of the GNU tools allegedly follow the POSIX standard (eg sort). Want to report a bug? Show how it doesn't follow the standard. Where do you find the standard? Go to the bank and make a loan, then send the money to IEEE. What good is a secret standard?
Considering the vast amount of open source software out there that include NO documentation and for which NO documentation even EXISTS, I wouldn't be so upset.
So they want to charge you for support? They can do it. They already gave you the source which is the important part.
You want premium support and a nicely printed manual? Pay for it. You don't want to pay? Read the source and figure out how it works. It really is that simple and you already do that for a lot of other open source projects, like I said before.
Proper format would be:
Ask Slashdot: Have you noticed that all Ask Slashdot articles lately have only been bitchy whines about the crappy content on this site and how everyone that reads /. these days is just a tourist? Am I the only person who has noticed it and how do you think we can reverse this growing trend in the community?
You said it's Open Source. If you don't like their policies fork the project.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
isn't so much charging for support per se, or even charging for the documentation ( and one could argue that one could read the source for that), it's the attaching of an NDA to the documentation that irks.
Frankly, I agree.
This is like O'Reilly saying, " You can't divulge any of the information in this book."
I'm sorry, but as my granny used to say, " Fuck that shit!"
Give a man a fish and you feed him for day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. Teach him to fish but make him sign an NDA first and, well, you're a shit head.
As it happens I've taught people to fish, for money. I assume some of those people have taught other people to fish, perhaps for money. Well, I *got* my money for what *I did.* They are getting money for what *they* did. The idea that I could forbid them from doing this is ludicrous.
What if a university did this? "Yeah, we'll teach you Java, but don't you dare think that means you can make money by teaching it yourself afterwards."
KFG
Free = Free. Want support? Pay the man. What about mySQL? If you have a problem that's not solvable on a community level, I don't see how you should *expect* someone to spend their time on your support, unless you compensate for it. They could be doing better things, such as, making more software.
I would have to definitely agree with the charging of the fee for support.
That company has made the source freely available to those who would use it. They work on it and improve it, fixing bugs as necessary. But the support itself costs money. If they were just another open source coder, then I'm sure they'd more than happily help you for free and maybe a thanks. But they are a company and they are charging support fees.
This is definitely within their right to do so in both the spirit and letter of open source. Though whether or not it agrees with different peoples' versions and understandings of open source is another matter.
As for documentation, what kind of documentation is being referred to? A help file? A Howto? Or a custom tailored document to help the user?
As for the having people basically sign a NDA to not disclose how they were shown to perform the install, that is something which is beyond the scope of "open source".
The reasoning is that open source covers the accessibility of the source code by the masses in a way which the masses can understand. If the code is beyond the means of the masses to understand, assuming it has not been obfuscated, then they require support to assist them with getting the code/app to work with their system. This help is billable and could very well be restricted information. Not from a security standpoint, but from a commodity standpoint. Ie, it is the model upon which their business is based.
One can think of it as buying software which comes with basic instructions which works for some, but doesn't for others. You can always pay more to obtain support and/or documents to better assist you, but you are not allowed to copy that document since it is copyrighted and is essentially the incentive for people to purchase support.
So I would agree with your assessment with the contractor example.
Some might point out that RedHat/etc are charging for support as well in a similar manner. Though I do not know if they are having people NDA'd.
Take with big whopping grains of salt for IANAL.
Winged Power Photography
It has been widely discussed, for years, that paying for support is completely in tune with the stated and unstated philosophy of the GNU Public License.
End of discussion.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
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
This may or may not apply to the story but it applies to most of the discussion here.
Its clear that there are a few holes in the GPL and I think it might be time to make changes. The GPL was intended so that developed software could be used by a wide group of people and compaines. Recent laws (such as DMCA) have restriced some of the rights that were implied when the current version of the software was written. One of thouse is the right to reverse engineer the code which accroding to my IP lawyers, is now illegal even if you have source code unless you get premission. Another hole is the NDA type agreements and those are related to some of the hiding behind trade secret laws. The GPL needs to address all of these and it needs to soon before some developer gets nailed. For example if I develop something for KDE and I steal the idea out of Gnome, its quite possible for the author of that part to sue (and win) under current US tradesecret or DMCA law even though Gnome is GPLed and its license was written with the intent of having its bits reused elsewhere.
Let's say you've just bought a device. Say a NBX100 from 3com. Now how do you know if its running GNU software or not? If they hide the copyright message, you won't know will you? At least they left in one small text message that is very gnu tar specifc. A grep GNU on their exe image shows a positive match as does a grep on "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License". So far attempts to get the source have not been productive but I did go to great lenghts to get explicit permission to reverse engineer the code from the persons whos name is on the copyright because any attempt to look at the binary code could be a DMCA violation under current law because the GPL doesn't grant that permission.
The GPL needs a anti-NDA and a reverse engeering clause added to it at once.
Hell, most open source software does not even have much documentation period....So having to pay for quality docs for free software sounds like just as (or more so) solid of an OS business plan as any of the other I have heard. If all else fails -- you can always look "under the hood" (at the source) to see what makes it tick -- how can it get any better than that?
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Oh. So that's why Debian is supposed to be so much cooler than Red Hat.
I'm off to Debian's site to install it for the first time...
The whole idea behind free software is to share information so everyone benefits.
Funny - I always thought the whole idea was to share source code.
creation science book
That's an excellent use of time - spend your own time redoing stuff someone else did for the sole purpose of giving it away to be able to laugh at people stupid enough to try to charge for support for a product they're already giving the source code away for.
You must place absolutely no value on your own time.
creation science book
The way that I see it is that they are giving away the source so that others can see it and are sure that it is secure and reliable.
Learning how to use that source is what they are charging for. Since it {the documentation} is distributed as a separate item, it can have whatever license/restriction that they want for it since they wrote it. SInce it is clearly stated, I have no real problem with that.
--
Time is on my side