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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.
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.
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]
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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
" 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
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--
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
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).
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