Slashdot Mirror
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.
I'm on the fence with this issue. I see the side about earning a paycheck. I understand the rewards that go along with altruism. I understand the need for standards and most importantly open standards. But, we all need to make a paycheck. Plain and simple. Say for a moment free software does continue to be successful, even enormously successful over the next few years, what does the future look like to those thinking of entering the field at that time?
My contribution is worth nothing compared to the vast resource open source gives me.
Even for prolific contributers who have give millions of lines of code this probably holds true. Even for Linus Open Source code has returned the rest of an operating system, status, and one hell of a CV - arguably more than he has contributed.
Even if my contribution of a few simple lines were enough to contribute to the downfall of the software market, then I consider the fact that I have to work in something other than programming (which I do) to be not a price but an indication that things are working well - the overall (knowlage) wealth of mankind is increasing so not so much heavy labour in software is required and energy can be focused elsewhere. That's what progress is all about.
Beep beep.
It's a well-known fact that only a very select few make good money off book deals. The rest work 80 hours a week for half a year to beef up their professional resume. It's hard work.
My answer is that the OSS movement is (mostly) commoditizing the "essential services" layer - much like the roads, sewers, and electrical grid that the broad economy needs to function. Only a *very* small percentage of IT industry jobs are building these things in propriatory products.
The vast number of IT jobs is in customization, adaptation, etc. of software to solve business specific problems.
In my case (R&D), the existance of OSS capabilities means that my corporate masters can spend vastly more on my labor to develop new solutions because they have saved (literally) millions of dollars on things like operating systems, compilers, databases, etc that I previously had to purchase.
Many times we've used a piece of open source software at this company, and paid the creator to modify it. Any changes he makes for us, are allowed to back into the open source project.
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
Consequences?
Yesterday I read that the owners of Google are billionaires and made it into Forbes magazine.
Google runs Linux.
Linus Torvalds is not a billionaire but his
project is making people wealthy.
I don't think he cares.
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
If you want money, fame, and to be good at something, just concentrate on doing what you love. The rest will come by themselves.
The buck doesn't stop there. I have friends who earn substantially less than I do, and I'm able to help them along quite significantly with free software.
Past that, people in moderately poor regions all over the world are starting to enjoying the benefits of free (beer) and free (open) software.
If I ditch the free (beer and open) stuff, I can't even afford to keep doing what I enjoy now, let alone friends and poor folks.
Hell with that!
Code written for resale is only the tip of the programming iceberg. It used to be said that 85% of all the code in the world was written in-house at banks and insurance companies. This is probably no longer the case (and a good thing; who in their right mind wants to wear a tie and grind out huge volumes of COBOL?) but most estimates put the proportion of all code written in-house at companies other than software vendors at over 75%.
This "vertical" code includes most of the stuff of MIS, the financial- and database-software customizations every medium and large company needs. It includes technical-specialist stuff like device drivers (nobody tries to make money selling device drivers!). It includes all kinds of embedded code for our increasingly microchip-driven machines - from machine tools and jet airliners to cars to microwave ovens and toasters.
Most vertical code is integrated with its environment in ways that make reusing or copying it very difficult. (This is true whether the "environment" is a business office's set of procedures or the fuel-injection system of a combine harvester.) Thus, as the environment changes, there is a lot of work continually needed to keep the software in step.
This is called "maintenance", and any software engineer or systems analyst will tell you that it makes up the vast majority of what programmers get paid to do. And it will still need to be done, even when most software is open-source.
Between originating, customizing and maintaining vertical code (and related tasks like system administration and troubleshooting), the use value of software would still support the millions of good jobs in that 75% even if all "horizontal" or standalone software were free.
Open source certainly does not necessarily mean the software development industry as a whole will shed paying jobs; with programming talent as scarce relative to demand as it has been, it probably just means more commercial projects will be able to find bodies to do them.
Information Rules:
How to sell your information:
First lesson: do not protect your information to the maximun. Protect it to maximize its value:
Lessons show by thouse who give free samples, or free books on internet that people by in paper...
The main problema that if they not program by free their work wony be paid almost all the time or it will be paid poorly.
By working in free software their abilities are more important because their software is more widely used. They have reached a bigger market. And i is very important in programming were the cost of another copy of the code is almost free.
Sell 20 copies at 5 $ and it won't solve your live
Make a piece of program used by 100.000 users and you can live with maintainence.
And of course it is more ethicall
"many great artworks and musical works were done for free."
and many more were done for profit. Michaelangelo got paid for painting the sistine chapel. Bach, Beethoven, Mozard, Handel, etc pretty much got paid for anything they ever did.
Yes, you can do stuff just for 'love'. But after RTFA I would tend to side more with the author... then again the 'Open Source' thing isnt a religion to me.
meh. to each their own.
"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"
No, what I want to know is how will any of these pay my bills and feed me?
I need to sell my software to eat, If I give my software away, how does this help ME, I know how it helps EVERYONE, but I dont think everyone is going to buy my food while I write code for them.
TruePunk | Games
I've got a house, a car, a job, and a family--and I prefer Open Source. I've contributed to various projects, I run OSS on my desktop and at work, and if I came up with some program on my own time I'd be more likely to GPL it than make it shareware or try to sell licenses.
But I charge people money for writing code that they want me to write. That's how I get paid--that's where my monthly paychecks come from. 99% of that code is in-house code that nobody will ever see again. But if they do manage to sell it again to other people, more power to them--I don't think it's immoral. But like the parent said, releasing my code for free doesn't mean not getting paid for writing it.
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
I hoped to read a new argument in the debate, but this guy is making the same tired arguments we've all heard ever since Free software started. My response: as long as people want to do something new with computers, they'll have to hire programmers to write that new application. Free and open-source software helps us avoid duplicating efforts, and it makes us all more productive.
--
Long-term effects of Bush deficits
I know a lot of people who create software. Out of all of them, I think I am the only one who works on software that is sold on a cost-per copy basis.
Most programmers write software used internally for highly specialised purposes, or a custom application targetted at a single customer. Most of these organisations make great use of free software, and many contribute their changes back to the community. Other people produce drivers - which are given away for free with hardware - and third party defence systems with a single customer willing to pay a lot of money.
Added to this, most people are not willing to pay enough for software to make it worth marketing. His example of the software he wrote is an exception. Very rarely does software have a perceived value of several hundred dollars. Even if it does, it is often cheaper and easie to write it yourself. If people are going to do that, then you might as well give them a headstart.
you obviously don't have a mortgage.
:)
You do need to make money - its the glue that holds everything else together, however, you don't have to earn it from writing software. I think that the point he was making was that if your trade is software, then you should earn it from writing software
I doubt even that should stop you from writing OSS in your spare time, as a hobby.
Compare this to the University of Chicago, whose CS department offers a course in Free Software Practicum, the goal of which is to develop free software or work on existing free software and have your changes added to the code tree. It's the work of Prof. O'Donnell.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Agreed.
I work for a company that releases all our software as free software but makes money by supporting it, cutomizing it and consulting on it. Our market is small and developers are few, but we get the job done, and no one is going hungry as far as I know. I don't have any animosity towards Microsoft except as it relates to the fact that their software exposes me to a great deal of risk because of the bugs, but I think they have every right to do software the way they have chosen. Open Source and Free Software isn't the only way to do software, but it can many times be the better way to do software from a quality and agility standpoint...
That's my $0.02...
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
Geeks usually have say in the hiring of other geeks. If you can't program worth a shit, and someone asks my expert opinion on
how well you may fit in technically, you are sunk.
I guess eclipse is a big lie too.. since ONLY open source developers use it, or perl, or apache, since it's ONLY opensource peo
ple. Get real. If you do somethign important enough, you can get paid for maintenance and customization. Isn't that how dell
anda few car companies are doing things now? The world isn't about delivering A product, but delivering one YOUR way. It's
a world driven by IS and IT now, not about producing widgets.
Once, I wrote 2d ticker, that supports adding and deleting information on the fly. Nothing many MANY other geeks couldn't do,
but I did it none-the-less. This was in a lull at work, and I wanted to do something interesting. So I wrote it, had it revie
wed and people made suggestions. Did I MAKE anything from it? Yeah, experience. When someone asks me, "Did you know swing an
d the java2d api?" I can now say, "Yeah, I've done some stuff. Nothing commercial, but here's an example of my work. Tell me
what you think of it.
Life isn't about yes's and no's. There's reasons to do OSS... like fulfilling needs other than money. Learning, personal need, experience and just filling in that time when you think doing an ERP project at the office is lame and you wanna get your synapses going.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Consider operatiung systemns; clearly there is a role for Linux, and Linux has the largest free support base in the history of opensource. However there are probably over 100 different customized distros, each modified specifically for some reason, many of which are no longer free (i.e.: RedHat). Additionally there are many other operating systems, in various stages of development, by smaller groups around the globe. Of these, some are free and some are not. And the same holds true for application software.
Then there is the other concern, free or not, there have to be people who can actually implement these solutions in the real world, and make them work for a business. Regardless of the sorce of the software, and whether or not it is free, companies need (and will pay for) individuals with the skills to turn their software and hardware investments into a functional solution that meets the needs of the business. And no matter how flexible the solution is, there will also continue to be requirements for customizing the software; from installation, management and performance tuning to adding features, interfaces, et al. Businesses pay in cold hard cash for these skills.
So, if the boy wants to earn his stripes in the opensource movement, that is at least as viable as any other skill to list on a resume. It doesn't necessairly brand him as an idealist! What it does demonstrate is that he is concerned enough about the quality of a specific piece of software to invest his time and energy even if there is no direct profit.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
If I may use myself as a counterpoint:
First some background: I'm 28 years old, and dropped out of college my senior year because jobs were flying at me right and left.
Any software I write on my own is for my own personal enjoyment and education, is GPL'd, and I would be tickled pink if other people found it useful enough to them to use it.
As for the car, the house, the family? Because of my love for writing software, and willingness to keep honing my craft even during non-working hours, I am able to enjoy a 6 figure salary complete with loving wife, 2000 sq. foot home, and I own two brand new Lexus. Even in a down economy I am able to do this. Oh yeah, I also work for a non-profit org.
What keeps me employed and employable? My knowledge and experience with open source software. There is only one piece of software I use at work that is not open source, and that is Oracle, which is not even in my core skillset. My knowledge of Linux, a large set of apache products, and several other open source packages, are more valuable to me careerwise than knowledge of Oracle.
What do I consider the holy grail of my career? I asked James Duncan Davidson (Ant, Tomcat fame) at a local JUG meeting one time how authoring open source software has helped his career? He said that being able to put on his resume that he wrote Ant has given him the ability to just walk into any shop he wants and get a job. That is currently what I would like to accomplish. It may not ever happen, but that doesn't matter either. What does matter, is that I am enjoying life as it is, tinkering with free software even though it may never make me rich.
I don't expect to become a millionaire from writing software. That kind of wealth will come from investing and smart business decisions. But, I hate business, and I love writing software, so I really don't care if I never become a millionaire, as long as I can still write software, I will be happy with my six figure income.
As perhaps a stronger counterpoint, Bill Gates didn't become the richest man in the world from software. He became the richest man in the world by being a brilliant business man.
If you want to make money by selling software, then yes, Open Source is financial suicide.
If you want to make money by giving away software and selling support, then Open Source is iffy but has a chance of working. You can often be replaced cheaper by an in-house programmer or local consultant.
However, if you want to make your own software to USE that helps your company make money, then Open Source is invaluable. If others can put portions of your application to good use, then they will help develop it and everyone benefits.
Still, though, any Open Source work cuts down on the available paid work for programmers, because it is efficient and may be supplemented by free coders. So Open Source makes a lot of sense for companies as a whole, perhaps less sense for individual programmers who want to make a living; pretty similar actually to the effect of outsourcing.
Compare how long Linux and DOS/Windows have both existed. Bill Gates is a multi-billionaire, Linus Torvalds is a multi-thousandaire. It's up to the individual to decide if they value a contribution to the computing community more than personal gain.
...
you can run those revenue streams on open or closed wares... and if anything, the above revenue models will be more successful on opensource wares because they are more reliable (as in they won't disappear if the partent company goes out of business) and the talent pool for using them is greater.
if it wasn't for oss wares, my company wouldn't even exist and i wouldn't have this job. period.
2 1337 4 u!
Yeah, 'cause that software is going to administer itself, patch itself, improve itself, etc. There's money to be made in "free" software. What Mr. Vasters failed to grasp is that the free in free software means freedom, not $0. Hell, RedHat and SuSE do a pretty good job making money on free software. Besides, there's nothing in the GNU license that says you can't sell your software. Besides, it's very easy to outsource general programming, it's not so easy to outsource one-off administration tasks. The money is in the admin / customization side these days, open source software is one of the keys to maintaining this skill set in the high-wage industrialized world. The fact that Mr. Vasters fails to grasp this merely demonstrates his a) inexperience in the IT field and b) inability to view the larger economic picture.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
This is the biggest myth. The money you make working with free software isn't in *any* of the traditionaly talked about methods. A very tiny few people make money on books, and support is one of the crappiest low-paying jobs there is. Fame may get you a position at a big industry company that needs what you maintain, but there are a select few of these positions too.
The money is in development, modification, and integration. I'm sitting here at work right now with 50 highly qualified engineers who are all well paid, and all work on free software. Since the day I graduated from college I've been doing well paid contract work on and with free software, and I was able to get the positions because I worked on free software for years. I was able to point my potential employers to successful programs that I had worked on, and as a result skipped the entire grind that this guy is talking about in his letter. I didn't have to spend 10 years after college proving my skills, because I already had. My title, salary, and responsibilities reflected that on day one.
Sure, OSS and free software isn't going to make your microsoft options go up in value, but writing the software can bring in a paycheck. All the OSS developers I know had no trouble getting jobs, even during the last 2 years.
What does the average slashdotter feel the copyright value is of the work that SCO bought from Novel?
What does the average slashdotter feel companies like AT&T spent to develope system V and how many programmers were involved? How many sleepless nights were spent burning the midnight oil?
Consider this please. The System V copyrights are worth NOTHING. NOTHING AT ALL.
No programmer can dare even LOOK at that code because they lay themselves wide open to a copyright infringment claim. No vendor other than SCO would even want to touch it today. As for SCO - they are going to crash and burn for many reasons, including the fact that they have pissed off so many of their customers that no one will touch them ever again.
This is perhaps one of the main reasons the OpenSoftware concept is so powerful... it creates a resource that people can actually use, a resource that can build and be refined and one where anyone in the world can benefit from it.
The closed source model on the other hand creates a product that is legally so radioactive that any sane programmer will stay miles away from it.
-------------
Suppose a young programmer starts working for a company. For 10 years he/she does some particularly brilliant work and eventually the company goes into hard times and fires said programmer.
What of the code? The programmer cannot use it. The company normally cannot sell it and usually doesn't really consider the code to have any value at all.
So our hypothetical programmer will find that 10 years down the track, they are faced with starting over from scratch because they cannot dare even TOUCH the work they themselves wrote.
Next, if we look at typical non-disclosure agreements we see the same programmer is literally barred from discussing the algorithms he thought up. Yet - usually these alorithms are realitivly obvious to practitioners in the trade.
Those old non-disclosure agreements can come back to haunt you and can in fact make you unemployable.
Well, these points might be considered extreme. Yet, consider the lastest story up in www.groklaw.com where the derivation of the signal.h file is discussed. Had Linus even seen the file from AT&T unix he may well have been tainted for life.
--------------
Well - the above example deals with work on proprietary code developed under a NDA. Flip the page. Suppose the code base is GPL.
Then our programming hero has access to everything he has done before. His skills are valuable because he knows the code base. There is no NDA because it makes no sense to try to impose an NDA on something that by its very nature MUST be open to all.
His employer benefitted as well. Without OpenSource software our programming hero would have to spend a high percentage of his time re-inventing the wheel and creating yet another incarnation of functions the company has to maintain.
So the bottom line here is that if anyone feels they are going to be working for the same benevolent employer for their whole career, then be my guest and sign the NDA and write closed source code for them.
On the other hand, if people feel this idea is a pipe dream, then please realise that if you develop under the GPL that you can never lose your work, your employer benefits and that old draconian NDA doesn't need to exist.
-----------
I shall close this comment off as follows.
The first round of computer manufactures that died were called the BUNCH. Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC, Honeywell. The second round of computer manufactures that died were the mini-computer manufactures which include Perkin Elmer, Prime, Texas Instruments, HP3000 series, VAX, Data General. This is not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination.
In the pure software arena we see the same process occuring: look at the "smart" word processor, 123, the Brief editor, Word Perfect, Sybase, IDMS, TOTAL... this list is so long I could not begin to do it justice.
Virtually every line of code written for those old systems has now been pissed up against the wall and is totally valueless.
If the work those ancient programmers did were under the GPL, then that code would be alive and vibrant today.
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.
When I was 20, I wanted to get rich writing software.
Then I realized that if I can only be rich by restricting the freedom of my fellow human beings, I don't want to be rich.
I am content to make a decent living writing and supporting software that respects their freedom, and lots of people are willing to pay me more than a decent living in exchange for doing so.
The bills get paid nicely because the value of free software far exceeds the cost of producing and maintaining it.
Today, I am rich by the standards of much of the world.
And I am grateful to God that I was able to earn a decent living - without having to in any way violate the rights of my fellow human beings.
Nonaggression works!
It is proprietary software ventures that are shipping jobs out of my country.......not free(dom) software.
Who knows, maybe free(dom) software development will bring a few of those jobs back?
Out of work developers can form companies to augment/improve/support popular free(dom) software.
What they have in higher worker costs they will more then make up for in not having to pay huge wages to executives/ceos/stockholders.......so they could probably compete in price. That is, assuming the US IT companies ever plan to reduce their prices to reflect there cheap overseas labor.
At some point the software a company works on will not be able to be improved anymore or a competeing company will do it better. In that case the developers could move on to new projects....business as usual
Who knows, maybe these free(dom) software companies will improve so much free(dom) software that they might out compete the proprietary counterparts.
They might return the favor to American CEO's and put them out of a job :)
Steve
I've contributed two simple lines of source to an Open Source project. Just two. In return I get FreeBSD (or pick any linux distribution), KDE (GNOME if you prefer), a lot of good enough apps. Most important to me, if I don't like something I'm encouraged to fix it. Since I've contributed I can also place on my resume a little line that I've developed for this project, which is in my favor as I'm look for a paying jobs. Anyone can look those two lines up and evaluate my quality, while the lines I've written for others are locked away and you can't look at them.
Seems like a good deal to me. I give 3 days of effort, contribute 2 lines, and get this in return.
Actually the code itself took just a few minutes (5 for the first line, and 1 for the second), most of the rest of the time was finding and understanding the code. Half a day to test, and a couple more minutes to create/submit a patch.
Outsourcing is a big problem. I can't imagine why a smart thinking company with any common sense would export intimate knowledge of his core business processes and pay for it too!
So because every CEO and his goat is tripping over himself to do exactly the same as all his competitors are already doing, all these companies are flushing their corporate secrets to third world countries.
Might as well do law school then, because that will be the only business model that generates any revenue at all in the years to come. If only to sue all these outsourcing shops who suddenly decide that your (local) competitor, or your foreign competitor pays better for their (read: your) knowledge.
Mod this up. He makes quite a few good points.
And he's right, I was being a tad crass.
But I honestly feel that your modivation in the world shouldn't only be about money. I don't say this behind a life of privilage or wealth. I don't have a high paying job. I'm not doing what I went to school for or what I made a name for myself in the pre-press world. I turned my back on it...with no great fortune or really any assets at all. My wife works, I work a part time job and we support my family. I used to make a nice wage but I turned my back on it. I'm very happy now, but before with much more money, I certainly wasn't. My wife wasn't happy either as the stress and pressures of my job wore at our marriage. Now everything has turned around.
So for me, I would put happiness over money. Money is needed certainly, but there comes a time when the pursuit of money overwhelms one's happiness.
Is my situation typical and do I advocate everyone doing this? Of course not. But I grew up in the 70's...it was a cynical time for a teen. I grew up as a cynic. I suppose I've changed and now I'm going to a more hippy approach to things. I really want to help others. I honestly belive that in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.
Ok, before I call for a group hug I'll sign off.
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
A programmer that codes sendmail, for example, will be a more intelligent, higher skilled programmer who doesn't spend the time with it. Having an employee involved in an open source project teaches them things like how to work well with a vastly distributed team, the inner workings of a large system, and just plain hones their skills more. Yeah, you may not make money on it, but there's an intangible benefit you receive from bettering your skills
--pete
I'm sure people thought all the apps had been created already when some dude came along with peer to peer networks. And MP3s. And shoutcast. And Fark. And distributed computing.
There are always tons of new things you can create/invent. Of course you can't create another office suite. They already exist. But why would you? Make something NEW and DIFFERENT.
This guy is clearly a moron. His post basically suggests that if you have something that can benifit mankind, you should make money off of it. What a fucking naive, selfish prick.
I work on open-source. I do it for free. Why? Because I enjoy doing the work and I support the project and I want to see it thrive and help people. Unlike some assholes, I'm quite happy helping people improve their lives without demanding something in return. Gee, imagine that.
First of all, is there such a thing as software with no monetary cost? I don't think so. It may have a substantially reduced monetary cost, but even something that is totally free and Free, such as Debian, costs at least some allocated share of the broadband connection I maintain and the electricity that powers it.
At my company, we sell a service based almost entirely on open source software (the chunk that ties it all together and creates our service is proprietary. The mail and web servers on which we base this, our trouble-ticketing system, and the internal system we use to manage the service are all all open source. We employ programmers who spend a great deal of time either directly working on the open source things (we have a lot of customization) or our own in-house software.
Paying those programmers is the monetary cost to us of open source. Is it cheaper than the monetary cost of proprietary software? Oh, yes. The cost of licensing and paying for support on proprietary software for our hundreds of servers would be prohibitive. I'm not certain we could even have a going concern based on proprietary software. However, our use of Free Software does nevertheless have a monetary cost.
Finally, if you look at the authors of Free/Open Source software, many (perhaps most) of them are making their livings as programmers. Some of them are even being paid to work on their Free projects. Most of the others are probably doing what our programmers do: work on in-house proprietary software which is not released to anyone but is used to run our business and provide our services.
As others have said elsewhere in this thread, there are many combinations of closed and open software that stand between the extremes of all-closed and all-open. I believe it will eventually come down the great majority of "infrastructure software" - operating systems, applications, a lot of embedded systems, services such as HTTP, SMTP, etc., being almost completely Free/Open Source. Proprietary stuff will be found in uses like what my company does, in niches where there either is no FOSS product or none that is any good, and inside of hardware products like routers and load balancers. As Linux distributions become better and better at end-user desktop use and at the same time enterprise-level server use, vendors of proprietary operating systems will find themselves squeezed harder and harder. The last two proprietary OSes standing will probably be Windows and Solaris, but even Microsoft and Sun will eventually have to make their revenue streams from something other than operating systems. Sun, as a hardware vendor, already largely does this. Microsoft will have to follow suit. They may wind up becoming a content company rather than an OS and office suite company, because those revenue streams are going to shrink drastically and maybe dry up entirely. They might even have to become an open source company themselves, but that won't put an end to Microsoft, just to their current business model.
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.
Indeed, it's OS projects that I developed in my spare time that secured me both my first and my last jobs. You can use OS to show off your prowess, technical ability, project management, etc.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
of my SourceForge projects, then I'll stop writing non-free software.
In the meanwhile, the stuff I do GPL is fluff I do to show off, not how I spend most of my hours.
Clear, Dark Skies
Beyond that, I think it provides an excellent answer to the "What can you bring to the company?" question. Being open they can inspect what the software you've codeveloped is like and see if they like it. It's win-win because you get to show off and the company gets to see the quality of the developer they're about to hire. Try to get that sort of perk from your last proprietary company.
Finally, open source projects provide something in a poor student's free time that they probably aren't apt to get during their college career. That's experience. I wrote a three hundred line program on my own for a class doesn't sound nearly as good as being responsible for even a few hundred lines in a much larger project, even if nobody really knows about either. And again, if it's a popular project then so much the better. What's the chances of working on a big project with no experience during college?
And these are just the personal benefits of having written some of the code. While working on the Linux kernel may not pay the rent, paying hundreds of dollars every time you want (or even need if you're a developer) to get a new version of some particular piece of software doesn't help pay it either. Think for a moment how much of a person's salary could go towards paying for the professional version of a proprietary operating system, office suite, database, and development studio. $2,500 down and about half of that every time there's an update, which seems to be every 2-3 years. Of course, last I checked that doesn't provide anything that would allow you to run your own webserver to try developing web applications, nor does it provide you with a source code repository for version tracking, nor could you run an email server if you wanted to try your hand at administering one of those. List keeps going.
There's a lot of benefit to everybody when there is free software at hand. There's plenty of software left to be written and companies will pay for that. But there's also a lot of software that already exists and isn't going to make anybody except the big companies money when it's sold while the company pays its workers to make more software. It is also likely cost people interested in the technical side of it more, since you can't just learn about it for free.
If not now, when?
I fully agree that we don't want everything to be free. That simply doesn't work, as communism has already proven.
However, FOSS simply will not go away. There will always be students and other people who are willing to program stuff for free out of idealism. Unless you want to go the SCO route, there's no way of stopping that.
The lesson here is that you should simply be realistic and try to find a job where you either code stuff that can't be done by FOSS products (adding business logic, developing niche products, etc.), where you are actually being payed to create or support FOSS (governments, IBM, HP, MySQL AB, etc.), or where your primary value doesn't lie in the actual code, but the ideas behind it (academic career).
It may not be traditional and it may not always be easy, but there most definitely still is money to be made in a world filled with FOSS. We'll just have to adapt. It's not like we have much of a choice.
Wow... that's a sharp argument. I never thought of "come on" before.
The fact that he could write the software for himself to solve a problem for his parents and license it out as a solution for money is a fluke. It wouldn't have worked if he wasn't working for his parents. The code would be owned by his employer and he wouldn't see a cent... and if he wasn't working for an employer, he wouldn't have understood the problem to be able to develop the software.
...and this is another story from a fellow who is bismirching people for open sourcing software to build resumes which he counters that is insignificant compared to the experience that he earned while working for mommy and daddy
Ugh... Some people don't realize the advantages they have.
Better to write GPL'd code and have a small name than to beg -- with a blank resume -- to be able to code software for dollars.
I listened to a speech this guy gave just a few weeks ago on Microsoft tech, and he and his company are heavily involved with building interest and solutions for the Microsoft platform and their idea of a service orientated architecture.
::Super::
Although he might be doing this anti open source ranting on his spare time, people should be aware of that he has a lot vested in the closed source world.
As long as you promote the idea that the software industry is mostly about cheap cheap products (labor services and software) it will make sense to go for the cheapest labor now that companies can get the cheapest software. If you are in one of these third-world countries that are gaining employment your perspective on this may be a little more positive than for those of us losing jobs. This has all gone to only make it possible for companies to draw margins even more razor thin than before, inviting catastrophe when they find that their entire software support/writing staff had to flee some tribal violence or a natural calamity that could have been avoided by a decent national infrastructure.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
While I agree with much of what the author of the letter has to say, I must say that I'm always dismayed by the holy wars that are fought in the technology community; moreover, at the amount of time and energy that are wasted on the holy wars. Open- vs. Closed- Java vs. MS Explorer vs. Mozilla/Firebird/whatever MP3 vs. Ogg (joke)
THINK
Joey, you are full of hot air and a liar. I don't believe you. Open source economics don't work.
If what you say is really true, then please post the URL or your employer/company. Educate me, enlight me, I want to believe, show me how it is done.
If not, then STFU !!!!!
Huh, guess you wouldn't write a book either then, or sell a piece of artwork. What a life! So far, no one has explained to me why books shouldn't be "free" and software should.
But people should also be free to write commercial, proprietary software, with the full protection of copyright. I believe that the combination of free and proprietary is the best of both worlds.
There's a storm brewing. Many (although certainly not all!) developers in the free software movement believe there should be no intellectual property rights for software - that "software is knowledge, and knowledge should be free".
Thankfully, the odds that they will be successful in bringing about this revolution are remote. It would require a radical rewriting of the law, and that isn't going to happen soon.
Programs are not people. Software can be free as in beer, but not free as in liberty. One may as well liberate your television. Only people can have freedom - the freedom to do any damn thing they wish with the fruits of their labour - whether they sell it, license it for money, use it for their own personnal use, release it under the GPL, or place it into the public domain.
Some people call this greedy. If wanting the freedom to do anything I want with my work is greedy, then I'm greedy. If wanting to be rewarded for my labours and provide for my family is greedy, then I'm greedy.
If the standards of living improve in your society, your society is healthier, and so are you. We're not in this for a quick buck. We need to have a plan that carries us for sixty to eighty years.
In other words: YOU ARE NOT A CORPORATION. DO NOT ACT LIKE ONE.
the Open Source movement is one of my main motivation to code and learn more. Its not about wanting money or more money, its about having a passion and make the work i do available to everyone in the world you would want to look at it or use it.
When you do something, the way you do it, is driven by the ideology behind of it. Sorry I dont beleive in capitalism because i think its simply a stupid short term way of thinking.
IBM and such is maybe making money on the back of people who code for free, but the code is still free. And thats what people who write it want.
At least these compagnie understand that there is a huge potential in the OSS. Don't the article writer think that if big capitalism industries like IBM profits that much from open source, its because open source IS currently really good?
OK i dont have much in my pocket for coding for free, but as a student i'm happier with more knowledge and less money, for the moment. Of course, once i'll have to get a real job I will have to get paid for the code i produce. All the source and projects i will had let on the internet will certainly help me getting a good job.
If I cant get paid to develop open source softwares, sure i will continue to use my time to contribute the movement out of my job.
But wait, i still havent choose the exact path i'm gonna follow in the futur years at school. I'd like to learn some about politics. I will need this skill to be more efficient in my activism.
The governements and learning institutions are the first we should "harass" about then not using free softwares. My goal for the moment would be to convert the places in my country's governement to use linux as desktop for example, when its technically possible.
Also, I try to become better writting open letters and articles to try to explain the open source to the mass (in my native language heh). Ignorance about this technology is the number one enemy in my view.
Well, i'm becoming pretty much offtopic. But it was to say that the guy who wrote the article simply dosent have any kind of social consience and think for himself at the too much present moment.
The exact same argument could be applied to, say, IBM's open-source contributions.
Thanks, I was searching hard for an on-topic post and am glad to see yours. The question is: How can people make money while writing open-source code?
I think the short answer is that programmers can be (and are being) paid for writing open source that satisfies the immediate and particular needs of the company they work for.
The long answer is to compare two models of software and its place in our economy. One model is the proprietary code one, where there are two types of companies: one which produces software, and one which uses the software. In this model there is a strong distinction also between computer users and programmers.
The other model is one where software is free, but programmers will be hired by companies to customize and extend software to meet their peculiar needs. This model tends to blur the distinction between programmers and users. Computers run programs, and so to use a computer is in some sense to program it.
The second model is world where software tools are more effectively leveraged and more valuable. So libraries become more complete, languages more powerful, and programming becomes easier for everyone. Good documentation is also valued.
The first model encourages building a higher barrier between users and programmers, so that the trade secrets needed to program are a commodity by themselves. That is the transparent mindset of the author of the letter. The attitude is that the knowledge of programming is one's net worth, and that giving it away by writing free code somehow lessens your worth.
I think that the proprietary software model does not work as well in a free market economy, where competition is the driving force behind innovation. In this model, competition necessarily leads to duplication of effort. Also having multiple competing proprietary OSes or software suites will multiply the need for specialized knowledge, and thus divide the value if a programmer's training. For example, if a DB programmer was trained in using Microsoft Access, but not trained in the equally-popular Nanosoft Gain (tm), they would only qualify for half of the current job openings. This explains Microsoft's delusions of benevolence. By dominating the market, they think they are reducing duplicated efforts to compete aginst them, and increasing the value of MS-trained programmers. In the world where software is a commodity, software companies naturally gravitate toward a monopoly.
Competition still thrives in the OS world, but software is not one of the trade commodities therein. Companies use software to help them be competetive with other goods or services.
So for these reasons and many more, companies are beginning to realize the value in the open software model. This model requires a critical mass of free software for it to work well, but I think that in many areas we've reached that critical mass.
Well, at least that's they way I see it. But I'm working in acedamia as a post-doc researcher, and don't have any comp-sci degrees. So I'm not experiencing any of this first-hand. But a lot of what I do is write (and use heavily) open-source code. My job requires that I be a good programmer, but that's not my profession. So naturally I support the OS model since it allows "amateur" programmers like me do my job. But my guesses about OS programming jobs in the industry is just from hearsay, so it's good to see other posts confirming it.
I think the article missed a subtle point. Open source is a developer-created phenomenon. Open source software is normally written for some real use. That is, we need the software we write. Sometimes it's only written to be able to understand how software engineering works [students]. Now that's the reason there are a gazillion of different IRC clients/bots, for some reason, many students seem to like IRC and want to understand how such "cool" technology works, so they write IRC clients/bots or whatever is the latest fad. Sometimes we write software because we hate the existing alternatives and want to improve the situation, and the current state of affairs is causing headache. This is why most open source software is intended for developer use only, it's developers writing software for ourselves.
Sometimes the reason is that there is no alternative available, but you need it. But more often, the reason is convenience. It's often easier to write some small utility yourself than try to use any existing solution or commercial package for it [not to mention it costs less]. I would view this as a failure of the commercial marketplace for handling commodity software.
Now, of course, the article makes the correct point that usually we don't get any money from the software, even if we use lots of time writing it. Why is that? The reason is, it's not possible to distribute software commercially that doesn't have the critical mass, which would allow all the participants in the distribution chain to recover their costs, which means generating a steady revenue stream for a very long time. This is highly improbable for the kinds of software where open source is most successful. This means that if your software is not "good enough" for the commercial market, then you have only three choices:
1) Not distribute it at all beyond your friends
2) Start a company to sell it, and improve the software to "commercial grade" by using various funding mechanisms available in the marketplace.
3) Open source it
From this point of view, open sourcing those is the least risky way to approach the problem. Starting a company for your 1000 line utility isn't a good choice. Starting a company doesn't work, if you already have a job. Open sourcing is one way of getting access to a large pool of people who are willing to try your software out, and find problems in it before you cause yourself problems due to those bugs. Once your software reaches the critical mass, it's already been open source for so much time that it's not possible to revert it back [and it would be counter-productive]. Also, keeping the software for yourself has no point, if you know you can't finish it by yourself. And most people are not willing to contribute for a cause that doesn't help them [e.g. if your licensing only allows you to benefit from it].
I think this might change if there were ways to commercially publish, reuse and distribute small pieces of software without huge distribution costs. But this doesn't exist. Long time ago, shareware was thought to be a solution, but it proved not to work, because people are not willing to send money for some random software for which there is no way it could ever evolve past its primitive state due to the licensing hurdle needed to get the money. Open source really solves this problem well, this allows everyone to benefit, even if it's not in monetary units. Just having the software is more valuable than the money you could ever make from it.
-- Esa Pulkkinen
[Sorry for the anonymous, don't have my logon handy and I'm remote.]
.. and he didn't. So we did. Tough on Phil, but he had his chance and was too slow.
I "made my bones" by writing and giving away free software. Without "credentials" as to my programming capabilities, it was the only way to show what I could do. And, indeed, I had many many queries from people willing to hire me to do stuff: "You did that? Hey, maybe you can do this!"
The only complainants I see are those who are trying to SELL commercial software, and who are losing out to the free stuff (be it freeware, public domain, open source, whatever). Screw them: if they can't compete, find another business. Or another product. Or produce something people are willing to pay for.
Remember the free zip and unzip from the Info-Zip Workgroup? I started up that collective of programmers, and we put out a great product. Who did we hurt? Yeah, maybe Phil Katz, but hey, we waited and waited for him to port his product to Unix
If FreeBSD or MySQL is stealing a market slice from the commercial companies, it's telling them something: make a better product or get out of the race.
David Kirschbaum
Toad Hall
I'm also 40, and have been in the software development, and later the IT operations world for decades. When I was a young software developer, I didn't get paid shit for all my hard work. My employer instead made a killing off of it. The software I wrote was grossly overpriced, but because it was for a niche market, we had our customers captive, and we reamed them. Charged them extra for the vasoline, and apparently they liked it because they kept coming back for more... for a while. Those days are long gone. Now I get paid a *lot* more money for running the IT operations of a moderate sized business organization (~1000 users, ~50 servers). As a manager who now chooses what software to buy, or what to develop in-house, I can tell you I will choose open source before closed proprietary stuff too. Even if I have to pay for it. Not just for the "free speech" part either. It's more about being able to control your own destiny. If you have the source, it really helps you maintain that control.
I work in the health industry, and all the software we use is available as free software. I make $76k/year. Is that good money?
During the day, I work mostly on infrastructure. During my free time, I contribute to projects where I can.
During the last couple of years, when other geeks have lost their jobs, I have been employed, without fear of losing my job.
Am I making money directly from Free software? No. But I am demonstrably saving my employer over $100k/year, about enough to pay my salary. Since they'd have to hire someone like me anyway, this is pure profit.
There are many people like me in the world. Most of the people who contribute to free software have day jobs. Some are professors, some are doctors, some are plumbers. I'd bet most, though, are just like me-- geeks, employed as geeks, doing geeky things. Since we'd be employed like this anyway, I don't see where it hurts that I use only free software, and that I contribute to free software.
I doubt many of use are millionaires, but I didn't get into computers to get rich. I got into computers because I love to program, and I love to make things work for people, and I love the idea that the $100k I saved may help save somebody's life.
Do I write a lot of software? No. But I write some. Hopefully I write enough to pay my debt to those that also write Free software.
You and the parent just don't get it. The point of Free Software and Open Source Software is to create better software. Its not about making more money from the software. Its not even about making less money from the software. Its just about making better, more useful software.
Open source works through innovation and support.
Their is auctually some code out their that has yet to be written that some corporation out their needs. This leads them to paying a developer real money to write it. They then go buy a car and a house and all that other stuff. At that point the closed source advocate tries to develop it into something he could sell to other corporations. The open source advocate puts up a cvs repository, makes a home page for people to download the software, and gets the community involved in maintaining the project. This means that the maintainance programmer has a reduced workload.
The second method of making money is supporting software. By support I mean charging money for anything releated to the software. Selling computers that run linux is providing support. Writing books is providing support. Selling pressed CDs is support. Also, some people auctually do buy the mythical "linux support contracts" from the likes of redhat and Novell.
In addition to these two methods their is a third method of making money with open source. Using open source software to make money. Watcom is a perfect example of this. Many years ago the Watcom C/C++ and Fortran compilers were these wonderfully advanced compilers that were used by many people. Eventually they got bought by a driver writing company. They needs a little modernization that the company could not finance on their own. So they launched www.openwatcom.com and setup a source repository. They get free labor from people with an interest with the compiler, and we get a free compiler that isn't gcc. Some people do indeed download and use the compiler to write closed source software and not give anything back. However, other than a little bandwidth, these people take nothing away from the project.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Programmers should be paid to code.
They should not, however, be paid per time their software is distributed, or installed, or executed. Building a business model in this way weakens the leverage gained by using computers to increase efficiency.
A computer that can do a task millions of times more efficiently than a human should by all means be allowed to do so. There should be no artificial barrier or artificial scarsity that makes it hard for humans to put computers to work to do these sorts of tasks. By paying the programmer (once) for coding (and additional times, as needed) for maintaining the code, but distributing freely, we can have machines that work for us.
But by paying for the mere distribution of software, or for the rights to install and run it, or worst of all, per instance of execution, we strip away all the advantages in efficiency gained by using computers, and put it all in the programmer's bank account (or, most likely, the company the programmer works for, not the programmer himself).
These companies get fat and rich, meanwhile people who can't afford to pay such ridiculous amounts of money for shrinkwrapped, EULA'd software, remain impoverished and now even enslaved by the software they purchased on the good-faith hope that it would make their lives easier and better.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Nova transcript
It was a Monday morning, September 19, and I was trying, convincing myself that it didn't work, just seeing exactly what the problem was, when suddenly, totally unexpectedly, I had this incredible revelation. I realized what was holding me up was exactly what would resolve the problem I had had in my Iwasawa theory attempt three years earlier, was -- It was the most -- the most important moment of my working life. It was so indescribably beautiful; it was so simple and so elegant, and I just stared in disbelief for twenty minutes. Then, during the day, I walked around the department. I'd keep coming back to my desk and looking to see if it was still there. It was still there.
I'm sorry, I should have said indescribably beautiful.
I think the balence we have today seems not too far off the mark, but in the long run who knows?
I believe that after 2 decades of abuse US patent and copyright laws will be libralized significantly.
an ill wind that blows no good
Very interesting perspective. I would even agree that, for now, everyone does win. However, in all honesty I have to wonder what happens when the software you wrote for free causes the business where you write for pay to go bankrupt?
Cake? Eat it?
So, some guy 10 or 20 years older than me can tell me what to do just by virtue of being older? Can tell me my ideals are all crap because I'm still wet behind the ears? 'F off!
Now, judging from the first paragraph, the young one could certainly be a bit more diplomatic:
Telling people their work is useless doesn't seem like a very skillful way to start a discussion. And responding that you're just too young too understand isn't exactly a helpful answer either.
Basically, there's a lot of ego mixed in to ideological debates, further adding to the confusion.
There are some anti-social nuts on both sides of this argument. Some that would have me coding for free to stay ethical, others that feel a need to hoard billions they can't ever spend.
FOSS is practical for me. I've released very small amounts of code when it could help others, and I've gotten good feedback which has helped me improve my code and my coding ability. I also benefit tremendously from using free software, and I'm capable of producing useful, value-creating code for my customers.
Linus released his OS in part because he was too lazy to finish it all himself- and that's an admirable quality in a geek. We're all richer for it.
I suggest we shrug off as a nuisance both the condescending "realists" and the strident "idealists", and stay a practical course that's working just fine. If we ignore them, they might not go away, but at least we won't get sucked down to their level
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
The thing is, that non free software may have a problem competing with free software licences like the GPL. If we look at the software market as an ecosystem we find that GPLed software can assimilate new traits as it goes along. Actually not unlike the Borg in Star Trek. Even though such comparison gives you sort of negative vibes, it is non the less a good comparison.
Assume that you were going to write a new non free Office sutie. Then you would have to compete with the market leading MS-Office. To do that you would have to make your product better than MS-Office. Such a product would cost you a lot develop.
You would also have to compete with the free OpenOffice.org and as OpenOffice.org only gives slightly less user value than MS-Office but is available to the for free as in bear. None of your customers would buy your closed source office suite unless it wasn't better than OpenOffice.org. But your cost of developing it would be almost as high as writing a developing a better than MS-Office closed source program.
So evidently the only ways to make a better office suite is to have enough financing to produce a better program, or to make addons for OpenOffice to make it better.
It is not very probable that you will manage to get the financing to create a better suit from scratch and even if you did interests on loans etc would reduce your profitability for a very long time.
On the other hand if you make add ons to OpenOffice.org you jump start your development and it will probably be a lot easier to find sombody willing to finance your project as it is easier to see the end of it. Usually it would be some company that need the extra features that will pay for your development effort. Apart from such payments you will have a chance of getting support contracts as you now constitutes the edge in OpenOffice technology. So that would fix the dinner on your table. The price you pay is that the you have to make your software free as in speach.
Apart from fixing the dinner on your table it also have raised the value of OpenOffice.org. This means that the next contributer can jumpstart his efforts from a slightly higher level. This makes the choise to use open souce rather than starting all over even easier.This is very similar to how the academic world works, and you see few university teachers and researchers working without a paycheck.
At some point the free solution will be just as good as the leading closed source product. This will mean that the closed source vender will have to lower his prices to get anything sold. But to manouver into a position where his product has the technical edge. This takes development. But now his margins are lower he will have to get that development cheaper. In the end he will find some programmer that is willing to do the work for a bowl of rice. But as he have to have a sales organization he will still not be able to compete.
The closed source developer can only live in a world where software is scarse. And the goal of the open software developer is to make software less scarse. You could see each closed software package vender as a hunter for software users (the prey). While the open source developer is more like a farmer that harvest from from his planted free software seeds in the form of support and add on services. This is simple for him to do as the cost of the seeds is relatively low. as he have had a lot of help developing them.
In fact this model works well even if your seed costs quite a lot. Just look at the mobile phone market. Many service providers are quite willing to give you a phone for free that cost a lot to develop provided you promise to use their service for a given amount of time. The importent thing to these companies is to have large user base and they get it by making the price of entering into their world of services low. And this is exactly what free software does.
Just as the stoneage society of hunters was transformed into farmers to sutstain larger populations, closed source com
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
Here's why I license my work under LGPL:
I have a core technology of PHP code that I developed over the years -- it allows me to do very rapid development of a broad class of common web database applications.
My career would be devastated if someone had the ability to tell me that I could not use my code anymore because I had been "paid for it". They pay me only for my time -- not for exclusive rights to my previously-written PHP source code that I use to solve their problems. The only purpose of my PHP code is to make me a more attractive employee/consultant -- it has been a tremendously beneficial investment for me.
However, it's entirely possible that some greedy lawyer could feel that my acceptance of compensation entitles them to exclusive use of my PHP code. For this reason, I flamboyantly wave the LGPL in my employer's/client's face and tell them that if they want me to solve their problem in 2 weeks (instead of 3 months), then they have to license the code from me under the LGPL. (I do it flamboyantly so they'll remember in case we end up in court.)
The LGPL is responsible for my current career. It gives me the ability to freely and safely use all the work that I have invested so much of my time in. Without the LGPL, one greedy lawyer could take away my whole career.
Clemens Vasters just doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. The LGPL protects developers from their ex-employers and ex-clients. Vasters is basically asking developers like me to work without legal protection. He's a crackpot who can be safely ignored.
I just read Clemens' letter and dashed this off. The next time someone tries to tell you that Open Source is bad, hopefully these might help. Please feel free to add on and flesh out the arguments with better ones, links, etc.
-------
Analogy:
This is no different from complaining that Medicins Sans Frontiers give away their medical skills for free or that Habitat for Humanity offer the efforts of skilled tradesmen at no cost.
Refutation:
Assertion. You will need money.
Rebuttal. Participating in an Open Source project doesn't eliminate my other opportunities to make money. In fact, it has occasionally created opportunities for development work.
R. Participation is scalable, much like charitable giving.
R. Participation has value in and of itself in increased skills and industry contacts, both of which facilitate making money in my field of choice.
A. Companies benefit from your work.
R. That's the point. Benefiting the common good means benefiting corporate citizens equally with private ones.
R. Companies aren't the only ones downloading Samba, Gnome, etc. In fact, IIRC, Samba was created because the developer wanted to share a printer with his wife. Individuals benefit from my work.
R. By removing the profit incentive to write and release software, Open Source developers enable development and exploration of new techniques and technologies that might not have ever been explored simply because no one could conceive of a short-term way to profit from them.
R. Someone else using my software in no way limits the benefits I receive from using my software.
A. The whole thing about "free software" is a lie created 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.
R. Free software was created by Stallman, OSF, etc. (Needs detailed research, but you get the idea.)
R. Some companies are able to realize a profit from supporting or re-distributing specific combinations of Open Source software. This is almost universally a company adding value in the form of subject-matter expertise and profiting in the process. They are profiting from the added value, not the software.
R. The economic barrier to entry for an Open Source company is very low. Anyone with an entrepreneurial bent and a sufficiently competitive idea can do the same kind of bundling and consulting that an IBM can. In time, it's possible for anyone to grow a company that can compete with IBM in this space.
R. Getting paid to advocate an idea is not a bad thing. In fact, if I could make a living advocating something that benefited society as opposed to, say, trying to sell chicken rotisseries, I would consider that an ethical victory.
A. At the bottom of the food chain are people like you, who are easily fooled by the "let's make the world a better place" rhetoric and who are so enthusiastic about technology that writing open-source - or any source for that matter - is the absolutely best imaginable way to spend their time. It doesn't matter whether you love what you are doing and consider this the hobby you want to spend 110% of your time on: 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.
R. I am not at the bottom of the food chain. In fact, I maintain ownership and control of all my work, and I am able to choose the terms under which I license it, just like any other author. No one is allowed to use my work without my explicit complicity.
R. I am not easily fooled, and your grounds for asserting that I am seem to stem from the single conclusion that because I support Open Source, I must somehow be unintelligent. This is, on it's face, a logical failure, compounded by a lack of supporting evidence. Please stop saying it.
R. No one is tricked
There is an old tradition in which people donate some portion of their time to work that improves the general welfare. In some professions, such as law and medicine, a certain amount of pro bono work is considered almost part of the job.
So I question the assumption that one must choose between creating open-source work and profiting from the fruits of you labor. Even for companies, it may make sense to devote a certain amount of resources to open source development of generally useful operating systems or utilities, thereby "buying into" a body of open source software which adds value to the company's proprietary products.
So they actually just release it (to be free - no strings attached), without dictating who or how it will be used as long as it remains free.
Free is not an economic term it is a software ecological term.
This is just my personal opinion though, but I think many people can agree on this view. Up, up and away....
According to me, there's a world of difference between a programmer and a coder. Good coders are indeed 99 cents a pound, but there really isn't that many good programmers. There is a lot of them (probably even millions of them), but the demand is still larger than the supply.
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha... that is one of the funniest, most misguided things I've ever read in my life. Non-Profit organisations still generate cash. The difference is they don't leave it sitting in banks. They spend it on whatever they do.
Let me give you an example - The Salvation Army. Now you probably think they do a lot of good in your community. Ignoring the fallacy of that statement, I can tell you now, they generate a SHITLOAD of cash globally. The money comes from charity drives, tithes, and from property. Here in NZ, the sallies are, I believe, the largest property owners in the country. This all generates cash cash and more cash.
Their IT budgets get blown on the latest and greatest of EVERYTHING. Their managers always have the best laptops, their desktops are always getting upgraded, etc. Now most other "for-profit" companies struggle to make their hardware last as long as they can because they are very cost conscious.
A few years ago, the local sallies had such an incompetant fuck as their IT manager that they got a range of new desktops from IBM for their whole building. He neglected to tell anyone that they were only HIRING them at great expense.
They didn't care. They have the money. They will get more.
And no, I never worked for them, but I know several people who have. And just for the record, most of the people they help have to be members of their religion for them to even pretend to care. OK, sure I may have picked the most corrupt non-profit organisation on the planet, but they definitely don't scrimp and save on their IT budgets.
They also don't use open source software unless it's miles better than anything commercial, AND they can get 24x7 support on it.
The reason girls and Windows users don't understand UNIX is because all the documentation is in Man files.
OSS/free as in freedom, not necessarily beer. They aren't bankrolling free software, that's the whole point. Software is becoming a commodity and I don't think they look at selling free software as a loss. BTW, Redhat is making it clear that OSS on the desktop is viable, as long as there is a price tag associated with it. Lose the notion that you can't sell free software, and you might be on the right track.
I and my collegues currently pay the bills writing OSS, though the business-model is a bit different.
We develope content management/online testing/digital repository software from within a university for said university and release it open-source.
How does this work as a business model? Since our stuff is OSS, other universities have taken it up and send us bug reports/patches making the software better for our home institution. As well, because of the open nature of our software, it is easier to get grants from national foundations to ease the financial burden on our home institution.
Gains via OSS:
- I get paid.
- My employer gets good software that is well tested at many institutions.
- The my employer saves on over-all costs due to collaboration with other universities and grants to our developement group.
- My employer gains cred (which is big in academics).
The counter-argument to all of this is that "well, that's academia". That's true, but the function of our software is not all that different from the things needed with the commercial sector where you need software tools to achieve your primary revenue stream. Those tools are where OSS developement can pay programmers. The biggest hurdle is getting that sort of thing started as you generally need to do it from the inside of a company in order to get paid for it.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
It's easy to look disinterested when the whole world is converted to your viewpoint. If Free Software was seen as the "normal" way of distributing software, then RMS wouldn't be doing much talking either.
Let's take a look back to when Free Software was normal, then:
If what you said is true then HP and IBM must be piling on some staggering loses given that they reported $2.5B and $1B of Linux revenue respectively in 2003 and 2002. Also, RedHat *never* stated they dropped their non-enterprise product line because it was losing money (revenue - expenses), they did it to focus on the enterprise market with subscription based support. Besides, RedHat still pushes it's Linux Enterprise Workstation as "ideal for all desktop deployments" right here.
If the Linux desktop is unviable, why did Novell just purchase SuSE and why did Sun roll out the Linux based JDS? To spite MS? It seems ironic that in these days of cost cutting and doing anything possible to boost stock prices that struggling companies like Novell and Sun would squander resources trying to "put some hurt" on MS. So, I'll take your wager on them "hemmoraging" cash, post detailed evidence in support please.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I was unable to read the article, apparently it has been slashdotted.
My first thought when I read the excerpt on Slashdot is that telling this to a young programmer is a lot like telling a young composer to not write music or telling an aspiring author to now write a novel.
In a very complete sense, you can compare authoring software to composing music or to writing a novel. In many cases, the author doesn't necessarily do it for profit but rather because it is something they are either compelled (as in driven) to do or, because they simply enjoy doing it.
Other postings on Slashdot and elsewhere tell us that the term "Free Software" is distinctly different from the term "Open Source Software" and that people like RMS suggest the use of Free over the use of Open Source precisely because we do not want to muddy the waters - we want to be clear that the writing of software is a free speech issue.
I don't want people to not write anything because they think that their thoughts are too valuable. I think it would be quite wrong to think that way.
Well, basic economics says that we'll go with the donated work (provided it's of equivalent quality).
The thing is, there is no right of a guaranteed career. Being an expert in mounted combat used to count for something--now it doesn't, and those who do it tend to do it for fun. Being an alchemist used to be quite profitable; now it is a hobby. Being a computer programmer used to be a job--in the future it, too, will be a hobby in most cases (just as there are folks getting paid for their skill at jousting, and getting paid for their alchemy--just not an awful lot).
Once software-writing has gotten to the point that it's so easily doable, there's no reason for it to behave as though the skill were a scarce one.
Just as with offshore outsourcing, economies move towards the most efficient solution. Paying a few dozen engineers $100,000 apiece for several years to produce an OS isn't nearly as efficient as letting college students and hobbyists (many of whom are engineers in their day jobs) hack on an OS until it's good. OSes are solved problems: there's just not much more that needs to be added.
Code-writing just isn't going to be a mass-marketable skill someday. Neither is aurochs-hunting.
It's not like software creation has to always get you something. This "gimme gimme gimme" shit is kind of deplorable. I have fun coding. I don't give a shit if I make money off of it, or get famous, I like doing it and if it can help someone else with a problem they need solved then that's great. Then I helped someone else, had some fun, and learned some stuff in the process. If I'm on payroll, then yes, I expect to be paid. But on my own time, I'm fully cognizant of the gratis nature of my work. I assume most open source developers are similar in at least one regard.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
The good looking, intelligent girl over there at the bar that you?d really like to talk to doesn?t care much whether you are famous amongst a group of geeks and neither does she even remotely fathom why you?d be famous for that stuff in the first place. I mean ? get real here
This point is provably false. Take the name of any maintainer of a dONLYecently sized project. type it in to google. See if it comes up as that person, how many links. The bigger the project, the more links. I think that is the sort of fame understood by any 'intelligent' person.
Read some industry magazines. Who exactly is making money out of ?free??
This guy should take his own advice. Companies like MySql, Trolltech, Redhat use opensource software to make money. They do it in ways that are not outsourcing deals, running data centers or selling hardware (Although I believe they make some money out of outsourcing deals). Of course, that was in the 10 seconds of thought I was willing to devote to the question.
So, two provably false statements, and not a lot of proof for the rest.
peopleToIgnore->append("Clemens Vasters")
I have written much software in the last 20 years and I have made the most money on software that did something, and I have made much of it public. The only software not made public has been either because my employer would not let me make it public, or because I simply haven't the time to publish it. My employers (and me early on) could not see that it was the service , not the source code, that we were selling.
The actual money earned has come from customizing the software, installing it, and maintaining it.
It is only dinosaurs like Microsoft and the RIAA that try to maintain the completely outdated idea that bits can be controlled.
Both should instead focus on what they provide the end user. In the case of music it is a cultural and entertainment experience, not disks of plastic. They (the musicians) should be focused on concerts, clothing lines, and nifty posters. Microsoft should (and won't) focus on providing working, bug free, virus free systems. Instead MS
is clearly focused on 'marketing'. The fact is that MS is in a defunct business of selling an operating system.
A fresh-out-of-college programmer should focus on getting experience in listening to the customer, customizing the system (with as little glue code as possible), and provining it to the customer so the customer makes lots of money. That is the long term and enduring value of an engineer. Such skills outlive 'dot com crashes' and company failures.
Often you make the source code public, others pick it up and make it better, and return it to you. Now the synergy between the programmers results in you provinding better systems to your customers, so they pay you even more. The customers then gain trust in you to get the job done no matter what, and when the do some nifty startup company, you get invited to the party. Then you make the big bucks.
Craig Vasters is a bit confused about the reasons why open source is succeeding. He seems to think that it's some vast political conspiracy to bring down capitalism. He seems to believe that there are huge numbers of people who, because of ideology, write open source software and just do without food, clothing, or housing while doing so. Nothing could be further from the truth: open source is succeeding because it is efficient and economically competitive. Real businesses find it cheaper to participate in, and contribute to, open source projects than to license their software. Real programmers develop it because someone pays them to.
What Vasters is advocating is much more like what communism used to amount to in the real world: Vasters wants to distort the market by appealing to people to accept higher than market prices for some ideological reason. Vasters wants central planning, courtesy of Microsoft. And the reason he is advocating this is simple: Vasters is part of the Microsoft Central Committee: he benefits personally from those market inefficiencies. He just can't accept the fact that he and his company are being made obsolete by newer and better ways of doing business. And, like other obsolete businesses, he is trying to portray his company and his way of doing business as some kind of victim of a vast conspiracy.
As for Aiden, yes, he can't follow into the footsteps of Bill Gates. People generally don't get rich anymore founding software
companies, and no amount of whining by Vasters is going to change that. What Aiden can do is make a good living doing custom software development. Whether he open sources that custom software or not doesn't even matter much--by definition, custom software is tailored to the needs of one client. You see, even in open source nirvana, there are plenty of people who will pay you for doing software development. Free software doesn't mean that nobody pays for software, it just means that people don't pay for software twice.
This article helped me find out how can we use open source for a financial gain? So far the situation is that some one that may only have half an idea of what he/she is doing stumbles upon a good idea comes out with it gets bought up by a bigger fish with a sum of money and they are left to their own devices. Now with open source no one person can make money off of on idea but on the quality of thier work. Now instead of getting a lump sum or 15 minuites of fame they are rated on the quality of the code they produce and since OSS is based almost purely on upkeep and maintence this gives a much longer lasting job to those who deserve it rather than those who jumped the bandwagon to fix y2k issues. We will no longer have to compete with the quantity of programmer corporations now have the money to invest programmers for the long term, more stable and reliable jobs... but that's just my 0.02 c (CDN) ;)
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
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.
This sounds like an anti-big-company FUD argument.
Just for the record, IBM (one such big company) got it's ass kicked by Microsoft. So what did they do, they sat back, regrouped, and realized that the only way to win was not to play. There will always be someone doing it cheaper or free in the software world. Why? Probably because the software that you might care about deeply is fringe material or completely unimportant to someone else. This someone else can simply give it away. For example, Netscape vs. Internet Explorer (free) or OpenOffice (free) vs. Microsoft Office.
Netscape needed the browser to make money. IE was a lost leader for Microsoft. They could just simply give it away. With Microsoft Office dominating the market, no other Office suite can gain a foothold, unless it were free. Other things can be more important (such as winning). So now IBM and Sun don't care about monetizing the software directly in every case or perhaps not to the scale of every single copy. Why, because it is a lost leader for them, they make their money on services or by selling a more complete version or by gaining an open door which was once closed. There will always be someone who cares less about any given application and simply gives it away. Some will do it simply because they enjoy it. Others may do it, simply because they believe in what they are doing. Still others may do it because they make their money elsewhere. Still others find no other way to gain a foothold because another company dominates.
The problem with software is that one copy is infinitely reproducible. It might seem that it is wrong or unfair that it should be this way, but it is simply the fact of the matter. For software, a single computer can be the design studio, the prototyping platform, the proof of concept platform, and, finally, the factory. Closed source software holds it's value by virtue of restricting the inbreed ability of a computer to create copies of software and thereby sell licenses for them.
How many copies of crappy software have you paid for? How many copies of crappy software have you simply disguarded because it didn't live up to the packaging or fit your particular needs? How many different types of Office software can their be? How many times has this been rewritten and disguarded when the business realities killed off a weaker company's software?
Software isn't the be-all, end-all of this world and the same software shouldn't have to be rewritten until the end of time.
What is wrong with simply giving it away? There will always be some software which hasn't yet been written. But, for the stuff that has (dozens of times), give it away. I would rather my grandson to not have to pay for another version of an OS (for example).
As an architect at a large Wall Street financial house, I typically review about 50-100 resumes per year. After finding this story, I would definitely *not* hire Clemens Vasters. So repulsed am I by this story, I will now urge my colleagues at other Wall St. financial firms to do the same. So busy is Mr. Vasters at defending some imaginary, Gatesian view of how technical software and people advance in big business, he misunderstands how we actually hire and make money. Mr. Vasters, I'm sorry to alert you -- and alert you for free, no less -- to the reality here in New York. Ask any Wall St. firm, ours included. Our strategic platform is *GNU* Linux. We have a great deal of Solaris, AIX, and some W2K infrastructure. But open source is already well established. Yes, the suits have bought it. But that means they actually want people -- *GNU people* -- who help them do this more. Your proprietary orientation is precisely what we farm out to India. I get three million resumes showing every skill imaginable, Java, C#, etc., largely from India and Russia. These resumes are highly crafted to show the supposed skills that we want. But these machine, business automaton products don't impress us (except when the person stands out from this mindless processing). Nor does your resume. I look at your .aspx service and I think, "what a shallow IT geek." And I say this as the technical lead of our Web Service strategy committee.
In contrast, people who have developed open source software show something important: that they actually care, and are in some way deeply interested in computers.
It shows they are invested in clean, publicly criticizable design.
This is who we want in IT departments. This is who we hire.
Money grubbers with overrated estimations of their own skills are a dime a dozen.
We leave them behind, I assure you.
I am not a programmer and even if I would love to contribute to the one or other piece of free software, I do not really find the time. But here my little story:
I am an earthquake engineer and what I sell - my work - is no mystery at all and is not allowed to be. When I sell a finished product to a customer, e.g. a study on the seismic capacities of his building, I can't tell him "Hey, your building is fine. I won't tell you how I figured that out, you might steal my method." Everybody on the street will agree with him that this is not how it is supposed to be. Firstly because somebody should be able to check if I did the right thing - security reasons. And secondly, what I sell is not the way the study is done, even if I figured out something new that is better of equivalent to the existing ways of doing it. But I sell the specific study of HIS building. If he can find a cheaper guy he might buy from him. And now the best thing: You can find everything on civil engineering on the web and in books! No limitation! No mysteries.
What if programmers just became software engineers? And were allowed to tell how they did?