Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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
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
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
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
Apples and oranges, kiddo. The book is covered by copyright; the techniques for using a software product are not. This is equivalent to including an NDA with a fiction book stating that you won't describe the plot to someone else.
Finding God in a Dog
And that is exactly what we are working on at WebGUI.nl.
sig not found
Except that you paid them for that service. If I'm a contractor and someone pays me to come in and install/troubleshoot/fix software and/or document for them how to do it again, I am certainly going to expect that they will not then release all of my work publicly (and I'll write the contract to that effect).
...
... your version of open source spirit/ethics/morals is different than everyone elses. This person's version is more capitalist, yours is more socialist. Neither is right or wrong.
/.ed so I couldn't check) then nothing is stopping everyone else from grabbing it and starting a separate free support site. Hell, depending on the license you can fork it off and start fixing things, too.
The only difference here is that:
* The support provider is the -author-, so they definitely know their stuff (not always a given).
* The package doesn't get free support from the author beyond bug fixes (which if you look at the number of open source packages out there, is definitely not a unique condition).
It's an Open Source package
If it's covered by one of the standard Open licenses (the site was
I'm not saying I like the methodology, but hey, if everyone dislikes it who is using it, it won't be hard to start a new support forum or develop something else to replace it.
-that's- Open Source spirit (to me).
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
Well, since you asked:
Finding God in a Dog
The SOURCE CODE IS AVAILABLE! If you have a problem, USE THE SOURCE! If you can't read the source code, do you feel the spirit of open source software is that a programmer somewhere must interpret it for you? Because that's what I hear you saying..."I can't read the source so they have to provide documentation for free."
So...your position is that when ignorant people use source code that I provide for free, then I am obligated to explain to them what it is that my source code does?
This isn't about best practices or business plans or anything like that...it's a guy who got software for no cost whining because the vendor has copyrighted the documentation and charges for support.
P.S. My answer then will be the same as it is now..."If you don't know how to use your FREE software, pay someone who can teach you. Don't whine."
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
Hi. I'm an artist.
OK. Give me all your art for free. You must also provide step-by-step instructions on how you created the art. You must also provide information on what the art did for you and what the art should do for me. If you ever have a show in an art gallery, I should be able to video tape it and give away the videos, even if you charged for admission. Anything that you I can conceive of that you can produce, you MUST provide for free.
THAT attitude sucks. It's tantamount to slavery - that's kind of a loaded word in the USA, but I don't know what else to call it when you want to mandate what someone produces and you don't want to pay them.
If you can't read source code, I'll bet you can pay someone else to read it for you. Or perhaps they'd take some custom art in exchange. That's the cool thing about a market economy.
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
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.