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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.
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
Absolutely not. As soon as you get government involved, OS becomes political, and influenced by political forces. This is the last thing we want.
Corporations want to take before they give. That's the sad truth. If there's no extra profit in it for them, they're less likely to do it.
Articles like this one are going to have to be published in places like the Wall Street Journal or other papers that corporate paperpushers look at. Then perhaps they'll catch on. Hopefully.
Good karma is sometimes worth a lot more than immediate profit -- if a company pitches in to help, and gets their name in the changelog or thankyou files, who knows? They might get a few customers that way.
i am a soviet space shuttle
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.
I find this article somewhat naive. It's certainly true that there are lot of companies abusing GPL and OSS for commercial purposes some of them probably modify code and never release their changes.
;-)
The article also suggest that instead of spending, and I quote
"If you replaced 10 $30,000 Nokia firewall with a free NetBSD implementation, but it lacks the ability to report to your management software, why not do something about it?"
This is not as easy as it sounds. Nokia probably payed through the nose to get the specs for that management software or signed more NDAs and deals that your company has seen in its lifetime. It's not always an option to do stuff yourself. Further most phb's will automagically raise the (valid) point, who to blame when the shit hits the fan. When something goes haywire and you payed some college kid $500, you can't call him in the middle of his exams and expect him to fix it. You can ask him, but he/she is certainly not obliged to fix it.
If you go with Nokia, you can give their tollfree hotline a call and tell them your problem and the chances are that the hotfix/patch is already available.
Things aren't so black/white as the article wants it to be, IMHO it's a pretty shitty article and doesn't really add anything to the scene apart from entropy. The busybox-link however, was interesting
Not true at all. The government only pays for a percentage of the cost - which would be approximately the marginal tax rate of the entity donating the code.
For example, if I donate $1 to a charity, and my marginal tax rate is 50%, I wind up paying $0.50 less in taxes than I would have without the tax deduction. I'm still out $0.50 from my own pocket.
IANAA (accountant), so YMMV.
>if you donate money to a charity and then take it out of your taxes, then effectively, you haven't donated one cent to the charity.
No, that's incorrect. Money donated to charity is subtracted from the taxable income, meaning that the taxable entity only "gets back" the amount of taxes you'd have paid on that marginal income, not the full amount of your donation.
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]
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Publishing is assymetrical. The efficiency of sharing info comes largely by its consumers outnumbering its producers. The network effect, where returns on investment increase when a platform's deployment footprint increases, makes the rapid spread of software deliver more to its users, especially its provider at the source. A little good software goes a long way.
This is not to say that publishing software is a one way street. Opening the source is a great move towards interactivating the communication along the publishing pathways. At the very least, sourcecode servers provide an infrastructure where feedback from consumers can input meaningfully to the revision process, including patches, and especially structured test results. Many one-to-many relations, bidirectional, gives OSS development the definitive advantage in efficiency and robustness.
--
make install -not war
And how many slashdotters who are NOT programmers have downloaded and used free software and never gave the authors any money for it? Isn't buying a Linux distro a way of giving back to the community if you're not a programmer.
Typical Open Source hypocrisy: Programmers that whine about paying for programs and demanding that it has to "Be Free as in Freedom" and then get pissed off because someone takes you up on that. Don't want someone to rip-off your work? Don't make it Free.
The price of "freedom in programming" is the freeloader.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I read the article, and it's one of those rare times that there's nothing much in it that isn't contained in the Slashdot summary. Anyway, isn't it totally to be expected that most companies would take everything they can get from open source, and not give anything back in terms of time or money?
But so what? What Linux needs more than anything else is to capture more than 20% of the desktop market. Once there's a foothold of that magnitude, we'll start seeing practically everything, from Doom III to Quickbooks, released in Linux.
So, as for those companies who aren't "giving back," -- I say, that merely by virtue of adding to the pool of Linux users, they are giving the open source movement exactly what it needs most.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
good point. That is the idea of free software. We talk about wanting to see linux on the desktop and more end-user penetration but what can/should we expect in return. These companies (from the article) that integrate open-source software rarely have development staff and usually have very low skilled administrative staff. At best they could submit bug reports and do testing but I think that is even a bit much to expect.
.. uhh karma event ;-)
Admittedly, everyone in the community has different motivations, but one principle of open source is that it is given away freely without expectation of compensation. Some may say that it is actually with the expectation of benefiting from others' work but that cant be viewed as a transactional event. More like a
No disrespect meant to Erik, but I took a look around the hall of shame and it's not really as shocking as it first appears. Buffalo's wireless router has a statement at the bottom of the Linked page stating they comply with the GPL and source code is available. The PDF link appears to be an exact copy of the GPL, in PDF format, for some reason.
This leaves three products (counting the bottom three DVD players as one naughty entity) which appear to be breaking the GPL and are doing nothing about it. Considering Erik's 'Products' page, we're doing alright. It would seem that the other companies aren't really kicking up a fuss over having to have the source code available, maybe they just didn't read the GPL when they first used the code?
From the viewpoint of the code actually being used, I think this is a good thing. It represents a shift towards OS. A previous poster said that if even a small percentage give something back, we're doing pretty well. How many closed-source companies can claim to have had constructive feedback on their products that OS has the potential to enjoy?
Perhaps if we are receptive to this use of OS code, we will reap the rewards later when companies realise what a good deal they're getting? Patience is a virtue?
Bruce
" We have to win by the same rules everyone else plays by."
Then we should manipulate congress to get our way?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I believe American corporations could already contribute to open source projects and receive R&D tax credits. The only difference would be the open source project would not be "in house" but if they could show they received something from the "donation" then it should work. Then again, I'm not a tax man. Of course, if the open source project was administered by a non-profit foundation, then a monetary contribution would be a charitable tax donation (Mozilla Foundation?)...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Heh. Nice troll... You forgot to mention that I have snakes for hair and I eat babies for breakfast... :-)
I have spent thousands of dollars of my own money, and zillions of hours developing busybox and uClibc and paying for hosting to make them available to the world. I really don't care if you happen to like me or not -- that is your business. I also don't care if you happen to like opensource stuff or not. Also your business. For the record, I did not post this to slashdot. I tried having my lawyer send letters to companies violating the busybox license. A good way to accomplish nothing -- it was just not working. Then I came up wit the idea of the Hall of Shame, and I have found it to be a far more effective tool for getting compliance. Most companies claim they didn't realize they were not in compliance, and are taking steps to fix the problems. Which I think is much better than getting lawyers involved, especially since I'm not very interested in suing people.
-Erik -- --This message was written using 73% post-consumer electrons--
Because you need to keep the cow alive?
Otherwise you are held *hostage* by whoever owns the cow.
Case in point:
Apple
Web browser, Safari, using KHTML code.
Adopted the code into WebKit and WebCore, and in turn provide fixes and patches.
Apple gains a small, lithe, agile, and capable HTML renderer
Apple's contributions guarantee KHTML does not wither and die due to lack of attention as Mozilla gains steam
Secondary effect of creating a third alternative to IE and Mozilla.
Everyone, including Mozilla and IE users, benefit from the diversity and growth.
Capitalism is efficient as long as the costs are taken into effect. If the cost of Open Source is factored in and it is still advantageous, then capitalism will adopt Open Source; we see this in IBM (they too contribute patches to Linux), SGI, Apple, and other, smaller, businesses that gain from the diverse contributors and stable development practices.
GPL Deconstructed
drivers for ports that no longer exist. Do you really need punchcard access?
//gs looked like. But maybe someone will care in 200 years. Who knows?
Someday, concievably, historians might.
OK, so maybe having a bunch of "useless" or obsolete software dumped into the quasi-public-domain isn't of much public good. But I still would think it is better than having all of that software simply lost to time forever.
We are going to have a relatively massive memory hole in the future's conception of what programming at the professional level at this time was like caused by the fact that all of the source code of the software we use today is going to be simply lost, since no one has copies except for the companies that made them, and those companies more than likely are not going to bother maintaining or keeping track of that code. No one today cares what the source code for Clarisworks versions 1 through 3 for the Apple
And then there's all those little "what if"s. For example, what if there's some huge quantity of deteriorating tapes somewhere containing some information important to someone, and it is determined these things need to be moved off and onto less fragile media, but the tape drives that read them can only be used from old, scarce and broken PDP-11s because they are the only platform for which drivers exist? In that light, device drivers for a dead platform don't sound so useless after all.
Things of that nature. Really, who can say what code that someone someday cold consider "useful"? I say, the more code preserved by the GPL in our cultural memory, the better.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Government is already deeply involved and the decisions you make are already political. This cannot be escaped. Government is what set up and controls copyright and patent regimes, the laws under which computer software are chiefly distributed, copied, and modified.
Government and big businesses are colluding to expand these regimes to include more behavior, making it impossible to do ordinary things without involving at least one of these regimes.
Your post speaks to a typical Slashdot mindset that precludes getting involved in government to affect a beneficial change for citizens. Your post is hardly insightful.
Digital Citizen
Nonetheless, incetives such as tax cuts do sound like an interesting idea.
...or at least make it mandatory to for-profit organizations to give a certain minimum amount and take it out of their taxes?
I agree that simply making a source-code donation (so to speak) into a tax-deductable gift could help encourage even further growth of open-source software. However, I don't see it happening unless the organization running the project were a registered non-profit outfit.
One thing in the original post really bugs me:
Make it mandatory? Are you serious? I wasn't sure if you meant to require a code contribution or a monetary one.
For code, this *might* be possible if your particular license required it, and even that would be pushing it IMO. This would only work with projects that are intended for developers to use; you'd never have anyone using Mozilla if such use required that you contribute code.
If you're talking about monetary contributions, then why bother being open-source in the first place? Essentially, you'd have a commercial product, but with the benefits of a non-profit outfit. It will never happen.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
First of all, they're giving the OSS community their support by using the code. Not much, but knowing that makes a difference.
Then, they're giving employment to the geeks that roll out the code. I've built a successful career... well, a career anyway, out of being paid to run,use and tame free software, and I owe it not only to the free software I work with but to the people who chose to use the free sotware. My career, and the things my employers can do, would have been a lot more limited had they not had another option but the roadmap laid down for them by a well known developer of feature limited and proprietary software.
It's a commercial world out there chaps, let's not forget it. Every one of you who gets paid to do something based on free software has been given something by your employer that depends on that choice of theirs: your liveliehood. If you still feel that nothing's been given back then dont break the chain, give something back yourselves and write some free software of your own.
Oxford Dictionaries Online
I think there are similar organizations dedicated to KDE, Apache, Mozilla, and many other large projects. For that matter, a serious e-mail to a dev list offering money can probably get a 501-c3 set up.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
Oh wait, this is /.
All these posts along the lines of, "You released it free, now take your lumps!" are completely missing the point. (Well, at least of the article. The point of the timothy, who linked to the article, is another matter)
The point is, if a company uses free software, it should open its pocketbook instead of whining. Instead of going, "Waaa, it doesn't have feature X!" or "Waaa, there's a bug!" it should pay someone to fix the problem. It could pay someone in-house, in which case it should release the patches back to the community, or it can pay someone externally to do it.
One point that's often missed about releasing patches done in-house: the GPL doesn't require it for most backend software, but it's still a good plan for reasons other than being ethical and nice. If you release the patches, they can be integrated into the product as a whole, meaning you don't have to handle the expensive task of being their sole maintainer in the future.
It seems to me that the article is exactly right. Companies already do this to an extent by paying companies like Redhat for support, but if a piece of software is important to your business, it only makes sense to take a direct hand in its development. The whole mentality of purely being a consumer of whatever is offered from the development community is neither productive nor cost-effective. If something is important to you, make it happen. Don't just wait for other people to do it for you. That sort of thinking gives you situations like Microsoft, where someone might get around to helping you eventually, but oh man will your pocketbook be sorry.
As with politics, money talks. If you want the best software for your business, you should help fund the developers who can make it happen. Otherwise, since it's free software, you'll be able to use whatever the community thinks is important, but what you think is important may not be considered as relevant or get done as quickly (or at all).
At the end of the commercial they say "His name . . . is LINUX". It was a weird commercial, but when a heavy hitter like IBM gets behind something the guys in the suits will start to listen. I predict that within 5 years, Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop and Office suite will be all but over.
Not all support needs to be financial or code.
I would argue that IBM, while it has contributed a great deal to the Linux kernel (RCU, JFS...) is currently making a much much greater contribution with its (admittedly in its own interest) staunch defense of the SCO suit, and it's countersuit claiming GPL violation (as well as patent infringement).
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
I would ask the same question of you--so what? We already have that thanks to emulation and there are plenty of other versions of Microsoft Windows where you can be catered to so long as you're willing to give up your freedom. What we need are Free Software programs to do these jobs, not more non-free software.
Perhaps that movement is satisified, but that movement is also very shortsighted in its mission to please businesses.
You certainly won't gain popularity over proprietors by giving them code under non-copyleft Free Software licenses or by choosing to run their proprietary alternative to a free program. Treating businesses like charities doesn't make you their friend, it sets you up to be taken advantage of. I'm reminded of the FSF's response to Microsoft when Microsoft's CEOs were on the lecture circuit calling the GNU General Public License a "cancer" and "unamerican":
Or why they ask you to give credit to the GNU operating system and not just the Linux kernal:
The chase for popularity is misguided and naive. I'm sure you have the best of intentions for GNU/Linux users, but you don't seem to understand that giving up freedom should not be done lightly. Sometimes giving up software freedom is acceptable, but most of the time it is not a good strategy. We are not well served with non-free programs to get jobs done.
Digital Citizen
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.
Digital Citizen
Hiring a code maintainer is exatly what a company does not want to do.
Every company should have someone who is responsible for tracking what software is used, who is using it, and what releases are used. They should check at least monthly to see if there are any updates, what the updates do, and whether the updates are critical or desirable for the company. This person is usually an administrator with no programming skills. This applies whether the software is all proprietary, all OSS, or mized. It is REQUIRED if proprietary software is involved to track the per-person and per-server and per-CPU licenses.
Maintainers are very expensive, and you can't hire them in pieces.
I cannot be the only consultant who works hourly. Companies hire me when they need me. I go away when my task is done. They know I am available if they need more assistance. Does that fit your definition of "hiring in pieces?
The closest you can come to this is to hiring a company which specializes in maintaining the package you wanted.
Does it matter if it is a company or an individual? 1099s are 1099s regardless of how many people do the work. Hiring a company does mean you can have a better SLA than an individual can deliver. I had 4 companies want me in their offices for the same day in May; I was able to keep them all happy, but that is because my relationships are based on my controlling the schedule while making them happy, and they all know and accept that. I am hired through consulting companies, so the customers could ask for someone else from the consulting companies if there was anyone else who could handle the tasks.
Why do they need to specialize in THIS package? I am often shown the systems where some critical application is running and asked to fix something. I have to figure out where the files are, what language they are in, where the issue is, write the fix, and attempt to test it without destroying the live system. (The last time this happened, they pointed me to the wrong server!) A good programmer can work on anything. If you know the programming language, then you can narrow your search to people/companies that specialize in the language, but why limit yourself to somebody that knows THIS product? Maybe it was on the resume because they did some little fix for another customer. Check the list of active contributors to the package and see if one of them is willing to accept money from you in return for guaranteeing that your needs are filled. If not, then either find someone willing to become a (paid) contributor, or just find someone who is really good at programming.
In that case, you've lost the price advantage you had, and you've not gained the source.
It does not stop being OSS just because you hire someone else to look at it. I believe support for most OSS is equal or less expensive than equivalent support for proprietary software. It may have something to do with people being able to read the code. Or it might be that people who work with OSS tend to like software much more than people who just do it as a job.
You don't have people on site who can actually read the source,
Depends on your contract. Did you ask for someone onsite 24x7? Do you really need that? If you are hiring a company for support, then get a 4-hour SLA for critical issues. If the system is mission-critical, it should have enough redundancy that there is never a critical issue.
and if your service provider goes under, you're left without an escape.
Do you understand OSS? If your service provider goes under, you choose another service provider.
What's the advantage of this over buying from Microsoft?
When Microsoft goes under, there will be no updates. No bug fixes. No security fixes. With OSS, there is always somebody who can fix it. Your worst case is that you hire the best programmer you can find and give him much money to work on the software. But your company does not fall apart because you cannot fix/patch your productivity apps and web servers and every other piece of software you depend on.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.