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Young Programmer, Stop Advocating Free Software!
Lansdowne writes "Clemens Vasters, in an open letter to a young developer he met at a software conference, asks him to consider the consequences of writing software for free. "Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again."" While I don't particularly agree with all of the points made here, this is the type of question that needs to be answered to continue to get people involved in Free/Open/Libre/GNU/whatever source/software/code.
How much is that worth? Nothing?
why is worth always measured in money?
What's software worth? It's worth a great deal. Worth so much that it seems a terrible shame to imprison it behind a dollar sign...
I think that releasing your software under a OSI compatible licence increases the worth of your work by making it able to be used by others. It doesn't mean that when you give away your software that it is worth nothing. It means that that you want your software improved upon by the commmunity not a select few.
My UID is prime is yours?
Nobody can beat the market economy, as the supply of programming skills go up, the price will inevitably go down until some is written for free. Unless you're big monopoly (De Beers comes to mind) you really can't totally influence supply and demand. My advice to any programmer would be to "code what you feel" and people will pay you for customizations and new designs later.
Something like an painter, generally you're painting for free until your talent is discovered, and then you rake in the big bucks...
...in bed
There are MANY ways to earn a living with free software.
Once you write a successful application, you have book deals.
OSS is a sure and quick way to show your prowess and become moderately famous overnight.
And Most importantly, I haven't yet met a boss who could take free code and use it. No matter how free and open code is, there is still a job market for people who can use it, tailor it, and integrate it into a business.
The list goes on. But as you can see. Writing OSS isn't throwing your time away.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Do the IBM business model:
Write the software for free and then earn a lifetime's wages in supporting it.
Problem solved.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
A guy who has already built his reputation and established his "above wage earning" credentials in the industry wants all those that have yet to acquire that valuable resource to stop trying, or at least to start earning wages and preserve the satus quo that has served him so well so far.
Well unless the letter was a very elegant piece of irony (and I doubt it). He should STFU and help these young subversives bring down the pillars of the temple that has so elegantly enslaved us all. Ok that last bit is a little severe but it's pretty close.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Most work in this world is brain-grinding, soul-sucking tedium. It isn't satisfying. We do it to get paid... and maybe we like the field itself. But the majority of any job is jumping through hoops.
So you go home, and what do you do for fun? Maybe you watch TV... or maybe you do the part of your field that was really why you got into it. The part you like... the part you rarely get to do at work.
This guy has certainly lost the plot. I am 17 years old, and I have been working on open source software for a while now. I would never consider closed source software as a preferred alternative to open source simply because once I have a program "out there" as it were, the program is going to be so improved vastly by people who have vastly more knowledge than me. There is always someone in the world who can do something that you did, better, and that's what OSS is, doesn't that guy get it? I think "Aidan" was actually talking about OSS rather than free per se software anyway. Just my 2 pence Tim
tim
...Consider the consequences of writing software for free. "Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again."
Applying this logic to the letter itself, offered for free (the horror!), an interesting conclusion is reached regarding its value.
I couldn't agree more wholehearted. Indeed, when I was 20, I thought that all software had to be free. Now that I'm (past) 30, I sometimes wonder where all the paychecks get paid from.
I need to clarify what my letter just said:
Don't help your fellow man, it's a screw everyone before they screw you world.
The only thing you need to measure yourself with is money. If you do something and don't make money from it, you're a failure.
Don't try to help your fellow programmer and accept no help from them, and beware their code! After all, they may be after your job...so best you be private and screw them before they screw you (see above)
If you learned to do something in school, you MUST make money from it, or you're a failure (again, see above)
With best wishes for your future (but not really)
Clemens
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
There are plenty of companies paying programmers good money to write free software. They want the software, and they believe that the quality of the software will increase by releasing the source. Or they believe they will sell more hardware when the software running on it is free. Or they sell support on the software they release.
Nobody asks a programmer to work for free. The author of the letter thinks that releasing code for free equals not getting paid for writing it. Think again.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
While the beginnings of the GNU project were altruistic (and BSD was government/university-funded), increasingly people find it useful to build on existing work in free software rather than re-implement everything from scratch. The GNU philosophy is that the more you can armtwist them into doing this with arcane licensing, the better. The BSD philosophy is that they'll return important changes to you anyway because it's easier to let you maintain it, while if they have valid reasons to keep it closed and commercial, why not? Both viewpoints seem to have worked fine so far and I don't see that changing.
Your post shows a clear misunderstanding of the software industry and what coders do. The vast majority of coders in the world aren't working on off the shelf software, which by and large Open Source/FOSS software replaces. Most work on bespoke applications for business. I have worked on perhaps 10 different software projects, only one of which had the aim of producing an off the shelf package (which failed to sell by the way), all the others were bespoke projects.
This is where most coders work, this is where most of the money is (unless you happen to write windows or office) and this is why Windows so dominates the desktop environment, because MS made it easy for people to create bespoke applications.
People will write free operating systems and database engines and paint programs, but if I want a bespoke package written to my spec to run my company then I have to pay for it, and that's where coders make their money.
Corporations regularly exploit the knowledge of employees and then cast them aside under at-will employment laws.
Imagine a guy with 10-20 years of experience as a technologist.. He ends up taking a $40K/year job as a sys admin to pay the bills in the down market..
Should he follow his normal work ethic and work 60-80 hours a week or put in a 'six figure salary' effort? Hell no!
If you can't get what you feel you are worth in the market, donate your time and skills where it will be appreciated and have a greater impact.
Not getting paid as a C++ programmer because you are a sys admin? Then don't answer development questions for your at-will employer.
and if that girl suddenly starts liking me because of my "big-load-o-cash"(tm), I probably wont like her anymore.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
There seems to be a lot of confusion between the concept of open source and free software. The fact that the source is visible to anyone does not imply that it can be used freely.
Someone should put together a license (if it does not exist yet) that allows a corporation to use an open source software product only after paying a fee to the project owner (an individual, a group, a community, etc).
See charts for twitter trends on Trendistic
When you work as a programmer, you get paid by the hour, you don't get royalties. So you're better off if the software you're making and getting paid for by the hour is open source. If the company folds (as even closed source companies do) you're an expert on the stuff you wrote yourself, and you can hack it somewhere else. If your employer can't make an open source business model work, fair enough, but if you're looking for one, you might as well go with one that doesn't need that "limited time" monopoly advantage going for it to make a buck, relying instead on things like expertise, service, craftmanship, trustworthiness etc.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
One thing is passion, another thing is the job you have.
You can always code at job, and if your passion is so strong to let you stay awake and code during the night, well, what's the matter in that case?
Most of the times, coding at work is not so exciting, challenging or stimulating...just because there's some company's logic to respect...
Nothing, in the coding world, is comparable to the immense satisfaction you get when some people email and thank you for the stuff you made publicly available.
What if a given person already has a job?
Most OSS developers are very talented (they wouldn't love what they are doing otherwise). They shouldn't have much problems landing a good job.
Or does the old fart indeed think that a guy should found a business on a project they create during their studying days? Does he think that the guy doesn't have what it takes to get a day job, so he should grasp the first straw he can get, i.e. his OSS project.
Getting bundled on a Linux distro is a bigger honor than most of us in OSS will ever get.
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
But, to me, it's like chiding someone for working in the Peace Corps. Sure, you're not going to get rich or much recognition for it, but that doesn't mean it's not a worthwhile thing to do.
I'm a capitalist, I believe in making money from what I do. No question about it. The programming I do does not go for free. In fact, over the years I've been rather well compensated, especially in the good times.
But when I was just getting started... when I was just a "young programmer" I wrote software and gave it away for free. This was long before the idea of GPL and such (AFAIK). My first big give-away success was FRPBBS, a piece of C64 BBS software that was unique in that it focused around running online roleplaying sessions. Those were the days!
That part of my life was absolutely essential to what I do today. I know employ a goodly number of people and contribute to our economy. And I owe a lot of that to the early experiences, encouragement and sheer fun of being able to put my code "out there".
Shall we do away with the Olympics because all endevors should yield an immediate profit? Small minds fail to graps the big picture yet again.
David Whatley
Please name a couple of restaurants that were opened AFTER giving away recipes. You're living in a dream world.
Ok, I'll rattle off a few: Elaines, Wolfgang Puck's Spago, Babbo Ristorante e Enoteca, Commander's Palace...want more? Let me know.
But please, you MUST know that a recipe is only one part of a meal at a restaurant...it's also the way it's prepared, WHO prepares it and what could be substituted at what it goes with etc etc.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
I'd like to make an analogy (despite it being the weakest form of argument) to the concepts of power and energy from phsyics (although the same is true for many physical processes). As I'm sure everyone here knows: Energy in itself is not a lot of use; it only becomes useful when something is done with it, in the case of energy that can only be the changing of the energy from one form to another. i.e the flow of energy is the important thing (power being used to measure that)...
;-)): the owning of the books is not what gives a lawyer their value, it is their ability to use those books. The owning of source code will be unimportant, every company will find it useful to maintain an programmer's department in the same way that they find it useful to maintain an IT department.
Similarly with society: to a taxed economy, the total amount of cash available is less important than the amount of flow of cash - it is the flow that is taxed, and hence allows governments to do their (supposed) good works. Equally it is the flow of cash that causes anything to be done. (I build you a fence, you mend my car; if the cash exchanged is the same then nothing has changed other than we now have one fixed fence and one mended car)
I think the same is going to become true of software. I have maintained for a long time that if the only thing you have that makes you valuable is your source code, then you are doomed. It is the ability to create the source code that has value; otherwise when something new is needed, there is no way to make it.
If the idea of free software takes off, the software industry won't die, it will become like the legal profession (yuck
Carpe Daemon
So, the guys at Redhat, Ximian, etc... don't make money? You can make money off of open source software, you just don't make it off of the code itself.
Even if you are a OSS developer, it does not mean you work for a company that writes OSS. This guy's letter is, well, to quote him: "It's idiocy". You can't assume that a company is just going to buy/get software for their needs. A lot of companies house their own developers write custom code for them.
Sorry, just ranting.
Real life programming jobs stink. They're usually not that interesting, but just flat business apps without depth, but with time constraints, byzantine politics, incompetent project managers and bizarrely generic business requirements.
So what do you do in your spare time? You work on your pet project, in which you can apply all the knowledge and nifty things you learned and/or you ever read about. And hey! It looks good on your resume too, because your real job doesn't give you the experience in those new technologies that your future employer/customer wants/needs.
And besides, Open Source is good for everyone, because the guys who do use your stuff can concentrate on delivering value to their customers, ie. writing boring business apps that implement the functionality that their customer asks for in their bizarre and overly vague requirements. And they also save time, so they can meet the deadline that their horse ass project manager has set all on his own.
Everyone wins with Open Source I think. It gives you the opportunity to start programming at a higher level of functionality.
When it is called 'culture', everybody agrees that it's been a good thing for ages.
PS. That's why software patents are bad. They block this culture, this incremental growth in knowledge.
if an open source / free (cost) solution does what your expensive product does, count yourself out of a job.
So what you're saying is that if you charge for your product, you'll get no sales because someone else does the same thing for free? And if you don't charge for your product, you'll earn nothing and starve? Nice, a lose-lose situation!
How about starting out writing OSS (instead of shuffling burgers or doing tech support) and when you're built some experience and reputation either start charging for support/book deals/customizations or accept a reasonably well-paid job coding for money and keep doing OSS on the side? I don't see Linus starving...
Money for nothing, pix for free
I think it is apparent that the writer has little familiarity with the free/open software environment. I would not be surprised to find that many of his views were formed by reading headlines or by the arguments of the unnamed youngster.
The writer is correct from his point of view: if you are already employeed writing closed software for sale open/free software gives you no benefit. It competes for customers, and the free/open software developers do not necessarily get payment in return for their work.
The truth is a little fuzzier: most software in this world is not written for commercial sale. It is written within companies to solve particular problems in support of business processes. If no commercial alternative exists, or if an external entity cannot create a custom product then a business creates their own. Since this development is a sunk cost, sharing it, and possibility benefiting from someone else's work has no negative effects on the bottom line.
The other angle is this: as a purchaser of business software I look more favorably on open than closed software. With closed software the vendor controls me. The vendor can increase costs, withdraw support and make pretty much whatever demands he wants. With open software I have a escape clause... if my relationship with the vendor becomes negative, or I need a feature the vendor cannot/will not supply I can always take the source and find someone else to support me. If customers start demanding this option, closed vendors may not want to become open, but they may have to in order to compete. (Free/open products give control back to the consumer, a plus for the consumer, a minus for the producer)
This is the same issue that many scientists face, and I would guess many other fields. If you measure worth in money than there is less that can be said for giving your work away for free. While there are companies releasing their source for free while posting profits there are many more open source projects making no money and closed source companies making lots of money. If the two are mutually exclusive which matters more to you?
In science there is the opportunity to work in an interesting field while working for a corporation. The problem is the work will become patent encumbered and proprietary as soon as it has any value. To let other people share in the success, and even improve upon it, something like a University grant is required for which the pay is lower.
You do your best every day of your life, make major discoveries and solve complex problems, and then you die. If you work for a corporation it's likely that your work will remain the private property of that corporation long after you're dead, with most people associating your work with the company and not you. However, if you gave up potential money to share your work then it is more likely to live on with little chance that your work will be associated with anyone besides you. So, ecide which you find more compelling.
The money comes from the fact that no matter how long a free or commercial software program is developed and maintained it absolutely will not fit all of the needs of any organization. Currently I work for a company that uses three large closed-source systems for order entry, provisioning, and billing. As configurable as these systems are, I spend all of my time writing applications that apply our business logic on top of them. I am forced to reads/write from the DB, apply custom triggers, rewrite their stored procedures, and in some cases edit or replace ASPX files to attain the integration needed. Not only is this time-consuming, risky, and often inconvenient for users (trigger errors don't often bubble up to the UI in a friendly way), it also violates all kinds of support licenses, which is whole the point of buying these large closed-source systems in the first place.
Now, back in the day we used Tomcat and wrote most of our stuff in-house. We had a need to write a custom security layer for authentication/authorization against both LDAP and a windows domain controller. Nothing like that existed, so we wrote one ourselves using the Tomcat SecurityPrincipal interface and simply pluging in our extensions. Took a day, at most, to write and test, whereas we would have had to jump through hoops for weeks on an IIS system.
That's where your money comes from. Taking what's already written and what nobody wants to write again and adding business-specific logic, and integrating it with other systems. One of our vendors has changed their business model. They make virtually nothing on software sales and support, but they survive on their consultancy business. IBM is also doing this, and you can see by Microsoft's latest ISV push that they recognize this trend as well.
The question now is do I pay for closed-source software and lock myself into consultancy from that one vendor, or do I use an open source package as my base and pick and choose the talent that I bring in to improve and maintain it? If it were my business, I would choose the latter.
"Cut it out; you're threatening my business model".
No, really; that's what it boils down to. Whether or not someone develops software for free or for money -a situation which is entirely independent of whether or not the source is open- is that person's own prerogative and no one else's.
This guy's just mad because he can't compete on price and doesn't want to compete on features or support.
seems like his whole point is that "Where do you want to be when you are 30?. Would you like to be married to some good looking girl, drive a car, own a home in some fancy neighborhood".
Now, I dont need to answer him, merely look back on history for the last few hundred years. If everyone who ever lived had their sights set on that sort of goal, this world, this life that we live, these things that we see around us in our daily life, would not exist.
Everything that you see, around us, everything that we use in our life, everything that makes our lives a bit more easier, a lot more sane, are because of people who gave up that dream to have a home at 30 and living with a beautiful girl. And if it had not been for those few, we would never know our true potential.
Not everyone will achieve that dream of true greatness, thereby inspiring the rest of the world to be like them, but if we dont follow in the paths of people who inspired us, then what good we are, as fellow geeks, as fellow human beings.
Rapid Nirvana
The people who contribute to those free OSS projects don't do that because they think it'd be neat if such and such software would exist for someone to use, in most cases (I can't say for sure "in all cases", blame me for being a scientist) they work in a project because that particular piece of software is something they want to use themselves.
See, there's so much I can do on my own. But if I want something done, and by letting you use my code I'll get some of yours in exchange, I've actually gained something, I've gained the hours of work it'd have taken to add that code, correct my bugs, or whatever that other person who uses my code gives me. That's the heart of the GPL.
If I have to put a value of n dollars per line of code, does that mean someone who sends me (or the public repository) y lines is actually giving me/us money? Is code worth a lot? Yes, that's why getting extra code on top of mine is a good value I get for releasing my software for free.
---- Take the Space Quiz!
It's so very Ayn Rand.
Clemens is very condescending towards Aiden. That should be a tip-off as to what's going on. He can't see beyond his own goals (recognition, money, girls) to other virtues of open-source: virtually zero-cost distribution and the ability for anyone to modify the software easily and share the results. He then goes on to ask how the software can be of any use without money changing hands; Clemens, it's people who drive trucks, manage factories, write software, not money.
"However, I start to wonder where your benefit is. You are - out of principle - not making any money out of this, because it is open-source and you and your buddies insist that it must be absolutely free. So you are putting all of that time and energy into this project for what? Fame? To found a career? Come on."
It's not about direct personal benefit, Clemens!
"The whole thing about 'free software' is a lie. It's a dream created and made popular by people who have a keen interest in having cheap software so that they can drive down their own cost and profit more or by people who can easily demand it, because they make their money out of speaking at conferences or write books about how nice it is to have free software."
Clemens' letter is an obvious attempt to support his means of making money (and age-ism), that's for sure.
Linus worked for Transmeta for years, and where's all the open source microcode he wrote for them? Now he's being payed to write linux, but that's a huge exception.
Most free software projects I see resort to panhandling for compensation. "If you like this program please send 5 dollars to my paypal."
Blech
Sorry, but in my case, it's true. I work for a small-ish "GIS company" that makes a name for itself by not being a traditional GIS company, but a knowledge company. We serve our customers by providing software that they need... but as I'm reminded all the time from the higher-ups, the value of the company is not really in the software, but in the employees. If all of the programmers suddenly disappeared, it would be practically impossible to replace them.
That said, they also use a lot of free and open source software internally (esp. bugzilla and apache), and see no problems with employees giving back.
I saw a post from some seventeen year old bragging about how he'd been working on open source stuff for a while, and isn't that just fine. But sorry, at seventeen you know so little that you don't even realize how little you know.
Sure, we can all point to Linus and ESR and say "Hey, they've made it big, therefore the business model to which we aspire must be valid!"... It may be valid, but it's hardly useful to refer to anecdotal evidence in support of that point.
So I reiterate - the only people I will personally listen to in this thread are people who can personally attest to living in the REAL world, and living REAL lives, entirely on Open Source dollars.
I left university a few years ago. Whereas during university, I advocated Free Software for ideological reasons, I now also advocate Open Source Software for practical reasons. Why? Because I've used so much bad software, much of it closed source, that I almost never even consider closed source solutions.
As a hacker, I hate rewriting code and worse than that, I hate banging my head against a brick wall. Clemens is essentially suggesting that you deliberately do your job in a bad or substandard manner. That is, in my opinion, completely unprofessional.
The quip that you can't make money from writing open source software is also false. True, you can no longer command high wages straight out of university, but that's more due to the tech crash than anything else. I have a car and if I want, will definitely be able to afford house/family when I reach 30.
Clemens is the one being irrational (though I'm under 30). I get paid to write useful things for my employer. They couldn't care less whether it is open or closed source. I care though, because open source allows me to leverage the combined intelligence of the whole world. It allows me to copy code from other people saving me and my employer valuable time. It saves me from reinventing the wheel at the cost of making my code open source as well. The trade off is that I don't get to choose what work I do, that's what my employer pays me for. There are boring bits and it essentially pays the bills.
I'd recommend every university student to regularly find ways to saving time and effort by copying code where appropriate (and properly reference of course). Once you realise the amount of time you save, you'd realise that open source isn't simply a matter of giving, it is also a way of taking.
Not only that, not all software that *this guy* writes has to be free. I definitely disagree with the article writer's assumption that "fame" won't get you a job - in CS, employers want porfolios, and working on Open Source is a great way to get that experience before someone will pay you.
Second, even if one *has* a job, working for a free project is (in effect, or in the case of FSF, actually) charity work. I guess computer scientists are the only ones to donate their skills to a good cause? Because Doctors Without Borders doesn't do anything like that. And lawyers never do pro bono work right?
As you say, I'm having a hard time seeing who loses - I've never heard of someone who does good work for a free project and can't parlay that into a job, and the output is (with the exception of anything GUI) top-notch.
I'm 19, and I'm lucky enough to (currently) be working part time for a well known free software company.
I'm still at university, in fact, I'm in my first year. While I've never had a letter like this, my parents have of course raised the same issues. This is what I told them. Hopefully it will be of use to other young people in my situation.
The fact is, that making money by selling software is hard. Damn hard. Even if you just work every day for a paycheque and go home at 5pm after you added a new feature to Photoshop, you're in the minority. Most programmers (I've seen statistics that say 80% but I have no idea how accurate that is) don't write software to sell, they write software to solve peoples problems.
Let's review why writing software and selling it is hard, from the perspective of the guy who had the idea and is trying to capitalize on it rather than the 9-5 hired hand.
Firstly, it's not just a matter of writing a program and sitting back while the cash rolls in. You are expected, at minimum, to release new versions every so often, have professional packaging, probably you will be required to support it and deal with the random problems people come to you with. This is not a short term commitment. Your software may be around and have users for years. In other words, selling software requires a considerable investment of effort and time.
Market conditions in software are not favourable. Software competes on a global market - this isn't a grocery store you're running. If the guy on the other side of the planet has a better product for a better price, you are in direct competition with them. It's not even a case of better product better price often - you think you can write a better word processor than Word? Go for it. Just don't expect to sell more than a few copies even if it is better. Life isn't fair, and the "unfree market" especially so.
No. Why would I want to work day after day on the same product, being a cog in the machine? I want to try for a better way.
What I'm currently valued for is not what I've written, you see, but what I can write. When people hire me (and I've worked for quite a few well known companies by now), they are hiring my knowledge and expertise which I sell to them typically at an hourly or monthly rate.
They purchase my skills because I can solve their problems. Ultimately this is what it's all about. One way programmers can solve peoples problems is by writing a product, setting up retail channels and then hoping that enough people have the same problem that they can strike it rich, but this is a high risk endevour and I'm not naturally somebody who likes high risk. I'd rather go to them directly (or in the case of one of the last jobs I did, went to a consortium of people), and solve their problem directly then move onto a different problem.
This is how I intend to earn my living, and so far it's working out pretty nicely.
Claiming that software has to be proprietary, that it has to be bought and sold as if it were a physical thing is a gross distortion of both economics and common sense. People tend to look at software as a machine, as a black box, and so it's natural to draw an analogy to a physical thing (hence copy protection) but really it's little more than a series of instructions for how to solve a problem.
If you asked me, "How do I make a pasta bake?" would I write down a recipe for a pasta bake then sell it to you on the condition that you didn't give anybody else a copy? Would I try and sell that as a physical product? Of course not. Just phrasing it in english and writing it down doesn't make it a product. It's simply an encapsulation of knowledge.
A better idea, if people ask you that often, is to teach people cooking, or alternatively become a chef, ie people pay you to excercise your skills (cooking) to solve their problem (hunger) and if you happen to invent new recipes and share them with fellow chefs at the same time then so what? Nobody loses.
Nothing to worry about here, move along, all Aiden is doing is advocating a different business model, get over it, and remember he might not retain all his idealistic zeal in the years to come, however, he is the future and you may not be.
So you'd better have lots of money instead, because then she'll be really, genuinely interested in you, right?
Seriously, I've talked about what I do wrt Free Software / Open Source with intelligent people without being a zealot, and (gasp) this has actually led to some really interesting conversations.
Also, it shows women that you see value in things beside money, which IMHO is a good thing. But, of course, that entirely depends on the type of person you're attracted to... :-)
What's odd is when you look at Linux, it's taking the IT industry by storm. And look at all the new jobs being created. Whole new industries popping up all over in implementation, support, in new distributions, embedded applications. It's not just a software product, it's an economy unto itself.
I don't know how anyone makes the argument there's no money in FOSS. Whole industries exist because of free software.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
As was pointed out in the letter, a lot of the really useful software ideas have already been realized. Of course, there will always be new hardware, and new drivers for it, etc...but how many new word processors or operating systems will there be?
Even in a world where there was no open source software, there would be precious few closed source solutions, with a handful of programmers maintaining them. Closed source doesn't magically guarantee that every programmer will have a job. Nor does the existance of an open source alternative put all the programmers out of a job.
Already, most programming jobs in America are something OTHER than creating an office suite or an operating system. Programmers do innovate new solutions, usually right on the payroll of the single company that needs that solution. Thats the world of programming in America, and those programmers will have jobs reguardless of the prominence of open source software.
The author's fundmental premise is sound: you need money to earn a living. However, the next premise: if you work on open source, there will be no money, is seriously questionable.
--AC
Young Mr. Wiles. The mathematical theorem you proved is the immediate result and the manifestation of what you learned and what you know. How much is the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem worth? Nothing? Think again.
Instead of publishing the result, I think you should keep it to yourself, charge all of the mathematicians who want to see it lots of money, and make them sign a non-disclosure agreement to promise not to use the result in their own work. Posterity will not be served, but you will be.
an ill wind that blows no good
At least TWENTY years ago, clueless people were saying that "in a few years, programmers will be out of a job, because all the programs will be written." What a load of tripe. Who could've forseen the Gimp, Apache, Tomcat, etc. 20 years ago? What makes you think that you have any idea you know what great new things some people will invent in the next twenty years?
Yeah, right.
No they won't. They find someone local, someone they already know, and they'll take your work and then that other someone will make money. Nobody will come knock on your door. You just aren't that famous, important, or good at what you do. You're giving away half of what you have to offer. They'll find someone who will be cheaper to do the other half.
No it's not that pretty. You have no deadlines. Your feature set is arbitrary. You have no crunch time. If one of your developers goes prima dona on you, you just ignore it and go with someone else. Completely different than the real world.
No it's not impressive. Google indexes the web. Half of the web happens to be pages of the nature "I eat poo." The fact that someone is involved in amature, hobby development is only of marginal interest to someone who has to consider the real world of delivering a product by a given date.
Microsoft produces plenty of software that runs on Windows and OSX that's (surprise, surprise) actually free.
Bull Shit.
Microsoft does not do anything that it doesn't think will produce revenue. All those "free" programs that you speek of are certainly paid for, you just don't see it on the reciept when you bought the OS. Perhaps a lesson in accounting would help here.
Not all software has to be free. But there are a few good things that will come from his open source project:
1) Experience.
Seriously. Who would hire a fresh-out-of-college person with no real world experience? At least when they contribute to open source they have some real world experience. If the software gets big, even better. If it is some small piddly OSS project, well, at least you tried. You have guy A who goes off, does what he has to do to pass college, and goes party. You have guy B, who now has a masters, plus 6, 8, or 10 years of real-world programming experience. Who will you hire? Seriously. Don't get a life, it won't get you work. =)
2) Hey, geeks know geeks. You apply for a job, you are the new "project manager" and have to keep several programmers working for you. You introduce yourself to you new team, say that you do this, you know this, and you've worked on this. Right there, you can get a good scoop of respect right there and get your work off to a great start.
3) You could get a job supporting or expanding on whatever project you've been working on. Not likely a full time job, but perhaps a few extra bucks every now and then, eh?
I think this guy is just scared that he soon will be outsourced. I think that because he has chosen to be a programmer, only one of the many things you can do with a CS degree, that he is very afraid that OSS programmers and OSS is taking away his work. Really, programming needs to be in two degrees, "basic" which is a 2 year degree, and advanced, which can be from 4 to 6 years. Programming is a commodity, it is a service industry. The more advanced things are program design(yes, I know, everyone complains about flowcharting it, UML, etc.. when they are in school, but when you gotta write that up and send it off to India, it matters, since it may be the only thing keeping you employed).
I think people get programming confused with an advanced profession because it is so flexible. It can be extremely advanced, from writing compilers, to JITs, etc... There is so much theory out there. But really, it is just doing the same stuff over and over again slightly differently. Yes, there are different languages. No, they are not difficult to learn new ones. Once you know the basics of programming it all falls in pretty quickly. How much you actually use of what new stuff you learned is pretty low on the scale too.
Whether you are writing enterprise apps(which has several methods, procedures, and theories on its own) or a quick one-off web app, it is basically the same stuff. I will say that enterprise apps require more discipline and knowledge than a quick one-off web app, but most of that can be learned in a month or two easily. Yes, univ's stretch it out by you only going to class two or three times a week for several months, and learning many other things while you are there. But if you focus, you can learn it all pretty quick.
Despite his first hand experience, the author of the letter doesn't understand the software business.
What Microsoft does and what independent programmers do are entirely unrelated.
Scan the help wanted ads. 98% of the job openings for programmers are NOT to work on shrink wrapped software products. If you're a programmer today, chances are you're writing custom software for a single (or few) buyers.
Open source means very little to the people who develop and the people who buy shrinkwrapped software.
But it means everything to everyone else in the industry, which is consequently the entire industry.
And there's plenty of money there.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I guess when your doctor tells you that you have cancer and suggest ways in which other people have dealt with it, you will summarily discard his advice on the grounds that he does not have the disease himself and therefore has nothing to offer.
Attack people's arguments, not their background. This is merely ad hominem and is invalid.
K
I write open source software, and it is LGPL'd and GPL'd. I am also employed writing closed-source software, which is actually based on my GPL'd software. That software is the FLTK toolkit. In case this joker wants to know, FLTK is NOT a big deal, it is not tiny, but it obviously will not take over the world and is a distant third (or fourth) to Qt and GTK and maybe even WxWindows in popularity.
Still I derive extrodinary benefit from the GPL software. I have an extremely well-debugged toolkit that I can easily modify. I have also achieved a good deal of fame for this, just a search for my name will reveal that 90% of the citations are for FLTK or other toolkits, while my for-hire work for Digital Domain is hardly noticed at all. I fully expect FLTK to be very important if I need to change jobs. Every single person we have interviewed for a job here who has heard of me has heard of me because they used FLTK.
In his followup letter this guy has the incredible lack of logic to say that programmers should not be selfish and then complain that he cannot use GPL code in his software. This is typical of somebody who just does not get it, or is purposely lying to get his own agenda across. The GPL is extremely selfish. I use it because it is the only way my code can be used and still belong to me. Anybody who does not understand this has not written open source code. Any anybody who complains both about the GPL and also complains about "poor programmers not getting paid" is a raving lunatic who should not be listened too.
I am also disgusted by his "pick up girls in the bar" line. Really, do you think one of the programmers at Microsoft working on Word has any better luck picking up girls in the bar? Do you think the typical salary paid to a software engineer makes the slightest difference in this? If you do, you are pretty seriously deluded. It's the managers and money-makers who are able to do this, and in fact open source is one way to screw with them. And if you happen to be good-looking and have a nice personality then you might get the girls and they really do not care one bit whether you open-source your code or not.
I know that everything I'm about to say has probably already been said by others, but I feel compelled to respond to this anyway.
What a load of crap-for-crap. I'd like to point out that I'm going to turn 32 this month, I have a house, a car, and don't have any problem getting dates. I don't have a family only because I don't want kids. I earn a good salary coding software for a company I'm part owner of. Yet I still believe wholeheartedly in open source and free software and hope to soon be making significant contributions to it myself.
Everyone does something with their free time - why piss in this kid's Wheaties because he chooses to spend some of it doing good work for the benefit of others rather than sitting in front of the TV or drinking down at the local bar? I don't know exactly what this kid said to Mr. Jacknuts here, but even if he did come across as a starry-eyed idealist, so what? I find it hard to condemn someone for believing that the world can be a better place and working toward that end. It's abundantly clear to me that the twin goals of supporting oneself in a capitalist society and creating free software are far from mutually exclusive. Why is that so hard for some people to understand?
Yes, Captain Obvious, we all have to find ways of supporting ourselves financially. But we geeks as a whole are a pretty clever bunch, and I'm sure that's why we so often find ways to support ourselves without compromising our ideals. If you can't see the inherent good in open source software and the people who dedicate the resources to create it, I truly feel sorry for you.
Or would you like to be like Mr. Gates, a "rich" man who cannot buy the things that really matter?
... Uhm ... what part of this isn't a "rich, fulfilling life?"
WTF is THAT supposed to mean? Last I checked, Bill Gates lives a safe, secure life in a dream home, is happily married with 3 kids, donates enormous amounts of cash to educational facilities (in case you were going to try and suggest that his conscience isn't clear), can afford to give everyone he cares about the life they've always dreamed of, has time to pursue anything he's interested in
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing? Think again.
He seems to have confused cost and value. Free software has no cost, but still has value.
Since when was Netware either open source or free?
Effective April 2004 RedHat has dropped their Linux desktop as an unviable product (their support revenue in no way covered their expenses.)
That is an amazing list of high quality companies, but to suggest that the OSS/free software available from Apple, IBM, Novell, or RedHat are driving business units that are making massive profits is simply insane. All of those companies are bankrolling OSS/free software from their existing mountains of cash with the hopes that by offering it at a loss they can put some hurt on the Microsoft juggernaut, and I would wager that each of them is hemmoraging cash from the business unit in the process.
The long term view is that eventually by reclaiming the desktop they will be able to provide services, support, and administrative tools that will be profitable, but in the past 3 years and for the immediate future RedHat is spelling it out loud and clear : OSS on the desktop is not a profit driven business venture.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I agree, what I meant by 'put some hurt on the Microsoft juggernaut' was 'gain market share in the corporate workplace.'
... but the 600 consumers could give a fsck about the refreshment 'holy war' going on between the two stew's - they just want something to drink with ice in it.
Overall the numbers of OSS developers with regard to consumers is analogous to two stewardesses on a transAtlantic 747-400. Serving drinks to 600 people. Twice. Those two can argue about whether bottled water is better because it is free and everybody knows what is in it, or Pepsi is better because of all the R&D that goes into it, or Jack Daniels is better because it is America's favorite and Pepsi is an evil corporation
IBM, Novell, Apple, and to a lesser extend RedHat - what these companies are offering is not OSS for the emotional well being of the customers, nor OSS so the customer can have the source, nor even a PR boost with the OSS crowd. IBM, Novell, to a lesser extent Apple and to a much lesser extent RH are offering a complete end to end business solution that a company can implement, satisfy 100% of their business needs, run the software they need to run in order to run a business. A chunk of that is the desktop and Linux on the desktop with OpenOffice is something they can directly make changes to (ie, have source to) in order to be a best fit solution for a large company's needs. In is only part of the solution, however, with big back ends supplied by IBM or Novell doing back end processing of business stuff (this is where they make the big bucks, IBM in particular.)
In addition to shaving $500 a seat (bulk subscription costs of MS operating system and office suite) in order to move those funds into the development and implementation of a customer's back office, if I had to guess they are going with Linux as the desktop component (Novell, IBM) because they will then have control front to back of the entire business environment in order to better make a complete solution work. And that is what they are betting corporate America (etc..) will pay big money for down the road.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
>"Open" is the political argumentation line, "free" is the economic argumentation line of the same thing
That's funny. It shows Clemens doesn't understand either. Both are political, both are practical, and both are almost orthogonal to monetary interests. In fact I'd say the "Free" most F/OSS guys discuss is what most would consider the "political" side of it, not the other way round.
Ask RMS whether he's writing Free software or Open Source...
Nope. Those companies have OSS for purely commercial reasons. This is a case of complementary economics. When two products are complements of eachother you want your complement product to be cheap so that a consumer can spend more money on your product (example: gas - cars). For IBM, a complementary product is the OS. If the OS is free their customers can spend more money buying servers. As easy as that.
Thanks for browsing at -1
Please vistit my blog: www.framtiden.nu
> All of those companies are bankrolling OSS/free software from their existing mountains of cash with the hopes that by offering it at a loss they can put some hurt on the Microsoft juggernaut, and I would wager that each of them is hemmoraging cash from the business unit in the process.
Yea, RedHat's whole purpose is to bleed Microsoft of money. That's one of the most paranoid things I've ever heard. RedHat is in a business, and Linux servers are selling while desktops just aren't well enough. It's smart business to focus on servers when that's the main market of Linux now.
> The long term view is that eventually by reclaiming the desktop they will be able to provide services, support, and administrative tools that will be profitable, but in the past 3 years and for the immediate future RedHat is spelling it out loud and clear : OSS on the desktop is not a profit driven business venture.
And of course everyone in the OS business is interested in taking monopoly control over desktops. Bleeding cash is not only not necessary for RedHat (since their development tweaking of Linux is cheaper than creating projects, so their total cost of production is cheaper than Microsoft), it'd be stupid considering RedHat doesn't have $40+ billion in the bank to wait out Microsoft. However, if they see a desktop market available, they'll take it. After all, there's 10x to 100x as many desktop users as server users.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
Not everyone is this world is so god damned materialistic. If I can do something to help others - be it a corporation or, preferably, individuals or charitable organizations - without appreciably lowering my quality of living, I would happily do so without needing any further motivation. Many, if not most, open-source projects are done in a person's spare time. If that's your thing, go for it. And there are a hundred other impetuses for creating free sowftware. In the end though, it is like 'giving back' to the community, whether that is the intent or not. If you want to make money off of it, then write it with that intent. It's more likely then that you'll be doing it full-time too.
It has a similar flavor to copyright (or the way copyright should be, not this ridiculous farce it is now.) You create a creative work. You choose the method of distribution - ie, free or not. Obviously, not-free is the more popular choice, since you need something to live on. In any event, after you have made some profit off of your work over a goodly amount of time (which should be no more than 20-30 years max, imho. But that's me) then the work becomes a public treasure. And you've got motivation to create other creative works and can't rest on the laurels of soemthing you did 40 years ago.
I'm sorry that this rant has rambled on. I'm tired, stressed, and sweaty from karate drill. My point really is just that avarice will be the downfall of society. Capitalism isn't moral nor ethical by nature. We have to impose those limits ourselves.
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a night.
Set a man afire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life. Terry Pratchett
A preposition is a terrible thing to end a sentence with.
I own a small business with 49 employees and we make commercialy avaialable, off the shelf software for account managment in a specific industry. Why oh why would I want to have someone on my payroll developing software that I'm just going to give away for free? Our software is our competitive advantage. True, we could get bug fixes, more eyes on the code, blah blah blah... but at the end of the day, if a customer of mine can go and download my software, compile it themselves, and just say screw off to me and my licensing costs, what's my motivation?
I know, someone's going to come up with... service it, charge for maintenance, support, etc. BULLSH*T! We make software that the whole point is that it's easy to administer, that my customers aren't going to need a legion of "support" IT folks, and their associated costs, and that customization is easy out of the box without spending a fortune. Again, where's my incentive to have my people giving away our source code? I pay my coders and designers a lot of money and respect to ensure that we can have the best product out there. That money doesn't come from some hippy commune called GPL. It's comes from paying customers who buy high-quality and low-support needing software from us.
From a buyer side of things, personally, I think the "write code, give it away for free, charge for support" business model is practically extortion. Our design strategy is to try and make software as easy to use, easy to administer and easy to setup as possible so that our clients don't have to spend extra time and money on training or more IT staff. Am I hearing right, that essentially the best business model for free software is to come up with applications that are confusing to use and require IT hand-holding to run and manage? If that's the case, I believe there's a lot of bad coders out there who don't really spend the time to make excellent applications.
Just because the app runs and does it's job doesn't mean it's finished and ready to go. Finish it, polish it up, make it good looking and easy to use, with clear documentation. That's the hardest part of writing software, and frankly, I won't purchase ( or use, or sell ) software that doesn't have that last crucial 10% done (which pretty much cuts out about 90% of the free stuff I've seen and played with). I'll pay for the 10%, because it enables myself and my staff to operate more efficiently, effectively and ultimately for less costs, and makes the actual cost of the software irrelevant.
Free software may work for large businesses in the server room, but frankly, for the small business person trying to make a living, the last thing I'm doing is giving away our blood sweat and tears!
"Free software" = Read "FREE SPEECH" not "free beer".
What about Microsoft. They release a whole slew of free software. For instance there is a version of Windows Media player for Windows, Mac OS, and even Solaris. ... I'd say that all these other companies release their free software for the same reasons that Microsoft releases its free software. To make money in some way.
The ironic thing is that the author of the letter realizes this, as he talks about the program he wrote exclusively for use in his father's business. Open-sourcing that would have had very little effect on his total revenue, as he would be payed just for developing the program in the first place. His mistake (or one of them) is that he somehow thinks that everything businesses need already exists today. In fact, there are quite a few in-house applications that businesses need, and allowing external sources to contribute to and use their code will increase the benefit to the businesses and the original programmer, rather than decreasing it.
I think that you're missing the point of this letter. The author is mainly critiquing the concept of an individual working on an OSS project for free. You're right, Google is profiting handsomly, and in part thanks to programmers who contributed to Linux and other OSS projects. Are those programmers making a dime off of Google's success? Other than a couple at Red Hat or maybe IBM, the answer is no.
My question the programmer addressed in this letter is, why on earth would you work for a for-profit organization without requiring compensation? Companies choosing to open up protocols or source code makes sense in certain scenarios. This is however very different then a programmer giving up their own personal time, which in my opinion just deteriorates our pofessional value as a whole.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
"Software is the immediate result and the manifestation of what your learned and what you know. How much is that worth? Nothing?"
The quote assumes value equals only money. That opinion is valid, but is not the only opinion that's valid. Many of my favorite personal accomplishments were done for free, and some even cost me significant cash.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This guy is living on another planet if he thinks people should get paid for every since act they do. His perception of Free Software developers seems to be of a starving unwashed bum writing valuable and salable code between sob stories to the tourists. If that were true, he might have a point.
But we Free Software developers are not starving unwashed bums giving away our livelihood. In my own case, I write proprietary software for pay during the day, and Free Software for fun and itch-scratching on weekends. Others write non-product software during the day, and Free Software on weekends. For others programming is pure hobby, as they do none of it while at work. The rare individual might actually get paid to write the Free Software itself.
But in no cases are we taking our metaphorical paychecks and tearing them up!
Why must we try to squeeze every penny out of every action? Maybe I should charge my neighbor a fee when he borrows my lawn mower. Maybe I should charge my kid when I repair his broken bicycle seat. Heck, maybe I should charge my wife for washing the dishes!
I write Free Software as a hobby. I also brew beer as a hobby. Is this guy going to be bitching that homebrew hobbyists need to get a life and open up a commercial brewhouse and stop wasting their time puttering about in the garage on weekends? "Oh man! You could have sold that beer, but you gave it away for free to your neighbor! Are you stupid?"
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
That's not a fair analogy since owning an apartment building costs you money whereas writing software costs you time. (though the later is infinitisimally (can't spell) more important)
If this article were a slashdot comment I'd mod it flamebait. It's obvious he hasn't researched nor does he know the slightest thing about free software. Does:
It's a dream created and made popular by people who have a keen interest in having cheap software so that they can drive down their own cost and profit more or by people who can easily demand it, because they make their money out of speaking at conferences or write books about how nice it is to have free software.
apply to rms, esr, linus? I don't think so, yet these are the people who "created" the "dream".
It's exploitation by companies who are not at all interested in creating stuff. They want to use your stuff for free. That's why they trick you into doing it.
Where are there examples of companies tricking people into starting projects? Yes, companies do benefit and make money off free software but most of the time these projects also benefit from fixes and patches. Even if these companies don't contribute back to a project then at least the world has gained a quality piece of software, which is accessible to people who couldn't otherwise afford it.
If you expect to gain (financially) from writing software then obviously writing free software isn't the way to go but why should people who do be slammed for it? It's their choice to make. Would he slam people who give up their free time to help the needy? I'd sure hope not. Obviously "Aiden" isn't going to work for free for the rest of his live but is there anything wrong with having a hobby?
I'm not involved in any free software projects but I've written software which I made available for free and for money and I got more kicks out of people who used my software mailing me or asking for features than I ever got from a pay cheque.
I apologise for the incoherent nature of this comment. It was written in a hurry.
That letter up there was the most rational thing I've ever read on Slashdot. YOU young programmer should read it. Indeed there was a save the world mentality when I left uni. When you leave you throw yourself into the first project you get at 200%. Luckily there was no free software, so I worked in a real job.
The software I wrote back then was world leading and whilst it was never sold big time, it certainly was legendary in the uni I ended up working in.
Now I'm 36. I work Project Leading and architecting software projects. I have a nice office that overlooks a very pretty city (although it is raining at the moment). I have travelled the back blocks of the world off the proceeds of writing software and had some pretty amazing experiences. Software paid well enough to enable me to take 2 years off without effectively working at all to do this.
I'v saved all the money I've earned in the last 5 years in software so I can now buy a really great house largely mortgage free because that is what is important to me now, and I can also now chill a little and start something very satisfying of my own to earn some money. What is important to you changes over life. What was important to me has changed so much. Its pretty hard for a young programmer to believe but it is true.
Don't throw all your efforts into free stuff. You are effectively making money for those evil corporations you hate. They ARE effectively making money off you.
Whilst is is unPC to earn money, money buys you time and a quality of time you spend. Don't waste the opportunity to increase the quality of the time you have.
If I could mod the original letter up to +10 I would. That is a vey sane piece of writing.
LOL! I can't think of anything less romantic.
This nonsense hardly merits a response. The writer is seriously delusional and projecting his own fears and inadequacies on to an ecosystem and value-system he doesn't understand. Perhaps he is jealous of the Tim O'Reillys of the world.What's spooky is the writer's random sprinkling of the word "family" throughout the text... he is making a subliminal emotional appeal instead of making his points with evidence.
The way it's written, it could have been planted as part of a coordinated FUD-Astroturf campaign to attack free/open source software on a "populist" level. A groklaw user has summarised the lies which comprise this "strategy":
I have added emphasis to the points which specifically refute the bullshit quoted at top.
you had me at #!