Do Companies Take Software, And Not Give?

SirDaShadow writes "The Inquirer has an excellent article that describes how companies take from the Open Source Community and how few are giving back. At the end of the article, it says it might be tax deductible. This made me think...wouldn't it be great for the OS community if we could provide a law to facilitate tax cuts to companies who give to OS, or at least make it mandatory to for-profit organizations to give a certain minimum amount and take it out of their taxes?" This piece ignores the obvious and large contributions that some companies have made in money, programmer time, code release and even just lending their name and credibility to projects like KDE and GNOME, but it does have some truth -- see for instance the Busybox Hall of Shame.

Comments

Mmmmmmaybe

[IamTheRealMike]

Well, of course there are two sides to every coin. I expect there's more corp sponsored free software hacking going on than you might think though. Remember that it's not always official - at my last job I submitted patches to various open source projects that I did on the job, because they happened to be basically what we needed and along the way I felt it was necessary to improve them. Often the only indication that they were done on paid time was that I sent them from my company email address.

Re:Mmmmmmaybe

[Cylix]

Indeed,

This is exactly the same story in my shop. Every application I have to fix and rework doesn't simply go to my personal patch folder. I would much rather have it part of a main branch so the issues gets resolved and hopefully in time it will be better then my fix.

We are actually seeing alot of vendor box's come in that use a great deal of free software and I suspect they perform similar services.

Here, I let management know that if it is under the GPL or similar license we are going to be submitting back fixes and in house scripts. Being we aren't a software shop they enjoy the exposure.

Unfortunately, we are just not profitable enough to really submit funds to organizations. I hope this changes in the future and one day I can tell management these guys really make our lives easy. It's time for a donation to the cause.

For a fact I know there are organizations who exist around Perl,Python,Sendmail (Heavily modified), etc and not one bit goes back. NDA bound not to say too much I'm afraid. However, I've seen massive scalability changes, authentication changes and whatnot. Some great work has been done in house and these companies are huge. Unfortunately, sometimes their work just doesn't conform to what people want back, but other then a patch or two I've never seen anything on the order of funding.

GPL in proprietary...

[SharpFang]

I personally wonder, how many "close source" companies secretly and illegally include GNU-copyrighted code in their products, and sell it without source, violating GPL, but nobody knows they do, just because nobody ever sees the source.

Of course if the source was to be ever revealed, that is some serious risk, but if the company plans to keep it always secret - why not?

[environment-friendly post, contains recycled material]

Not everything government does is bad.

[jbn-o]

If that is the typical slashdot attitude, then good. The most beneficial thing that government can do for its citizens is to leave them alone to live their lives the way they want to as much as possible.

How ironic it is then that your response is being carried on the Internet, an extension of a network which began as a government program.

If people took your attitude around the Great Depression, people wouldn't have the large government programs that pulled them out of poverty and helped restore some degree of trust in the US government. These programs were looked upon with scorn in the 1980's when the rich were doing so well and they didn't have much of an alternative press to deal with. But today we can see the international problems caused by widescale deregulation and so-called "free-trade" agreements that encourage what many call 'a race to the bottom'.

Now that the US economy is circling the drain again, people will probably look again at big government programs to help them compete with low wage jobs overseas. Someday people will realize what's in store when you leave your economy to corporations that chase the lowest paid worker on Earth but want all the tax breaks the US is willing to give.

While obviously not everything governments do is worthwhile or reasonable, some things governments do are. And in a government where you have the opportunity to participate, as you do in the US by talking with your representatives, participating in the media, and voting, you share the task of making it better.