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JBoss Founder Hard-Nosed About Open Source
Infonaut writes "In this Business Week interview, JBoss founder Marc Fleury refers to "hobbyist" Open Source contributors and makes the case that "no one is going to work for free." Fleury dismisses people who contribute for something other than money as "Hari Krishnas" and makes reference to the "hippie dream". Fleury's sharp, profit-focused approach has brought him success, but isn't it in some sense built on the shoulders of the hippies and hobbyists he seems to scorn?"
makes the case that "no one is going to work for free."
Hey, 1990 called. They want their open-source-failure theory back!
But he's definitely no politician. People want to believe that you can get something for nothing. He sounded a little on the abrasive side.
I found it interesting that he distinguishes between different types of software, implying that there would be vastly different business models for each -- "don't try this at home" I would have liked to have seen the interviewer nail him down on this a little more -- I think there is some good stuff there but without the details its hard to know whether he knows what he's talking about or not.
What's spaghetti got to do with hurricanes?
If he really has this attitude, he is sadly mistaken and most likely being a jerk.
A lot of my motivation for contributing is a way saying thanks.
How does he pay for all of his foundations? Or is he just a taker?
Since his stuff is Free (if it is) you can look at it as who cares?
One thing with people who only do it for the money is that I tend not to trust them not to make things unnecessarily complex in order to earn the service/consulting money.
In any case... Go Free Software.
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
Man that is fun.
Some nitpicks:
1) I prefer 'dirty' in front of the word 'hippie'
2) I can't believe he didn't work 'bearded GNU freak' into to the interview
I have to admire someone else who goes straight to the big ammo, high impact terminology. A kindred spirit.
"poorly disguised pirated copies"...hmm, I'd guess it's you who's the hippy he's talking about, judging by the reality-distortion effect of the grass you must me smoking.
Just let him say what he wants about open source software. I know that I'll never support his company from now on, and I feel quite safe in saying that open source software will continue to innovate far beyond anything his commercial world of software developers will produce.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Marc Fleury obviously doesn't understand the philosophy of opensource. Did he bother to consider revenue from support contracts? Or that companies will pay you to work on opensource software? Also, opensource software saves companies money. Instead of building your application from scratch for your particular company, use an existing opensource application and (thanks to source) pay for only modification to meet your needs, and your changes may be useful for others. Or you can dual license, or sell hardware with opensource software included.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
What the guy is saying is that he sees a lot of companies sitting around trying to make money off of other people's work (i.e. all twelve thousand linux distributions), whereas he wants to pay people to develop open-source applications. He's just saying that you can't have a business model where you say, "Hey, guys, you write my software for me and then I'm going to make all the money off of it!"
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
His statement is irrelevant because most OSS programmers already have a job, or are University students.
There really is no such thing as a free lunch and where the rubber meets the road, it comes down to the bucks. However, it certainly makes him look like a knob to piss on very things that have helped him get to where he is now. Dude needs to chillax and smoke a bowl I say.
There are other things people strive for apart from money.
For example gaining reputation in your respective social group can be a great incentive to do something.
So if he wanted to make the argument that people don't do things if they don't gain in some way from what they are doing, I'd agree, but only focusing on money is simply stupid.
Maybe all the drives Mr. Fleury in live is money, however that's clearly not the case for everyone.
Don't be put off by the somewhat tendentious write-up; the interview
itself is interesting, if brief. I think the case against "OSS" from a
purely business point of view is quite strong; but this doesn't worry
me, since I'm not in the business, and I prefer Free Software
anyway.
...as he showers regularly.
Sadly, successful people are often pricks in person. Sounds like JBoss Group needs to get some PR people on board to keep him from sounding like an ass.
There are many out there who basically have the same reservations about Free Software. They can't see how anyone would want to give away the fruits of their effort for free.
Maybe this is an area where Open Source organizations can do a little better PR. They can explain how most of us came up using Free Software, and want to similarly contribute back; bytes are free - it costs nothing to contribute something you did because it interested you; not everyone is driven by profit motive; etc...
Of course, this skeptical attitude tells us more about the person stating it than anything else. They wouldn't dream of doing something just to benefit the community, the first question they ask is "what's in it for me?"
This article is in the "business" category, which isn't any help if someone wants to find similar stories. Slashdot desperately needs a "flamebait ad-hit money-spinner" category.
What the hell is immotateing?
Beating up on hippies makes a lot of sense, because mostly they don't know how to fight, and are pacifists. Thus, you are very likely to win, or at least not get hurt if you don't win. So, a business model based on beating up on hippies would seem to be a low-risk proposition.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Err... you "obeosuly" have no idea of what you are talking about.
Opensource innovates just as much as anything else. Everything from filesystems such as Riser to decenterlized p2p systems such as Gnutella or even bittorrent for that matter.
How many artists choose Art over Money?
Most of them. Some artists do actually starve for their art, although this is perhaps a romanticized minority. Nonetheless, the general principle holds true: people driven to create art have less time for day jobs -- or if they're confined to day jobs, their souls suffer for want of art.
Thus with some coders, who give it away: they are driven to create the art of open source.
-kgj
-kgj
If you get free, you want a lot of it. If you give free, you're going to give until you're tired of giving, and that's exactly what happens in the open-source community.
u suratdunchela/chapter7.html
The Giver gives to the evil and the good alike. There are many fools, who receive in plenty, yet are thankless.
Pauris 20 -27 http://srec.gurmat.info/srecpublications/sabadgur
from Jupji Sahib by Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Nanak
What would you call Open Office then? OpenCiv? Please.
Had you used Konqueror to make this post, you would have had the benefit of a spell-check in the comment form.
Surely this feature must have been "immotated" from IE... oh wait!
Why are people so hate filled when it comes to the thought of people working in their spare time to help each other? Its called charity. I think this guy feels threatend. Why be so negative to a concept thats so positive?
The beauty of open source is that you can't complain about my attitude if you want the software. The source is all there. Finish it up yourself. All you have to do is take it, clean up the api a little more, finish the documentation and formal proofs that it works (it's one of those kind of programs).
The companies that sing the loudest praises of the Linux and open source "hippie dream" now will be the ones who eventually scorn it the most.
Take note IBM Inc., Google Inc., and most other touchy-feely open companies with more than just one person on the payroll. Take Redhat Inc., who were built on the efforts of volunteers whose work gradually became subsumed into a profit-driven entity only to snip the umbilical cord of the "hippie dream" after Redhat Version 9.
Yeah, welcome to capitalism fellow hippies. I hope they enjoy their stay.
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
Coding for free doesn't really have much to do with open source. You code for the WORLD, not just for yourself or for the company you directly code it for. Coders need to make a living, so we SELL products we code, and then we RELEASE THE CODE.
May the source be with you boy, you obviously have a lot to learn!
There is no greater hack than this
To lay down one's code for one's friends.
Vuja De: That sinking feeling that this is going to happen again. Often occurs in meetings with Product Managers.
but isn't it in some sense built on the shoulders of the hippies and hobbyists he seems to scorn
Not really. Java has continued to be a thorn in the side of the GNU camp because of it's licensing issues. His product has been built from the ground up and serves as a platform for the deployment of non-free software. Thus, he does not stand on the shoulders of those he scorns.
You have to de-humanize them or somehow make them seem less worthy of sympathy.
This is a time-tested tactic. It worked for Hitler. It can work for you too.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/04/22 12228&tid=108
And yhea its the Inquirer but still worth a read:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9504
JAVA DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL Editor-in-chief Alan Williamson has recently awarded Marc Fleury with the title "JBoss's own worst enemy" in his blog (http://alan.blog-city.com/readblog.cfm?BID=77874) . It appears that there were some polling inconsistencies with the JDJ awards and that the JBoss Group's CEO gave Williamson quite the verbal lashing in a letter earlier this week. Williamson reacted by publishing Fleury's email in his blog.
Who cares what he thinks?
you should learn to spell before you bash an entire community of people in a public forum.
Maybe you should imItate good spellers.
Do you senSe what I'm getting at?
He's not making a blanket statement about open source developers being Hari Krishnas, he's talking about hecklers in his audience.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
..for Travelocity.
Luxembourg has caved in: 56.52% yes for this undemocratic and unsocial constitution.
Fleury sounds like a jerk. I like JBoss, but maybe someone should create a copy project and get the source out of his hands. Charging for the documentation ticked off a number of people and this sort of noise will scare off more.
I think that you're overestimating the value of support contracts and other open source based business plans. Sure, there's some money to be made there, but it's a latecomer to the open source party and only a tiny piece of the puzzle.
Open source works because all of us are smarter than one of us. Programmers naturally look for preexisting solutions to problems, because it enables them to get to the thing that they really want to do faster. And they'll naturally return the favor when they can. It's just politeness to contribute bug fixes.
This model has serious, serious flaws. There will always be more takers than givers. But the good news is that distribution is cheap, so one giver can support hundreds of freeloaders.
Other problems are harder. Many of the contributions take place against the background of a standard closed-source project, where the management doesn't mind participating in open source as long as the real product development remains proprietary. A utopian pure open-source environment will fail; the whole thing works as well as it does only because the economics of redistribution are so cheap.
There are many other issues which are not easy to work around, and that's what this guy is really getting at: open source can't promote the non-fun stuff, like good user interfaces and (for the most part) QA. Certain crucial pieces of infrastructure (Apache, Linux kernel) have so many people banging on them that they get QA'ed anyway, and they're so integral to other money-making schemes that it ends up being in some people's interests to do the work anyway. But away from those projects the software gets buggier and buggier, and you'd have to pay people to make them less buggy.
So in the end there's money to be made in the standard business model, which is actually what JBoss is using. The difference is that some of the software they develop "leaks" around the edges into open source, because that's their way of playing nice with other people doing the same thing. The more core something is, the more effective it is to share your work and to use the shares in return; the system supports the freeloaders.
The real money is in doing specific work for specific customers, of which "support contracts" are only a trivial part. "Support contracts" are really just another name for "closed-source, proprietary software" built on top of the open source. And that's just business as usual.
As programmers, we'll share because it's fun and we'll share because we're a community that likes to help each other out. That's at the end of the day; from 9 to 5 we'll continue to write software the way it's always been done, for the same economic reasons: you have to pay people to develop the boring stuff and the stuff that involves knowing the subject domain. The kernel and Apache mean you don't have to know about anything except computers. If you want to build a ticket reservation site or a pharmaceutical database, you actually have to know something outside of computers, and that always costs money.
people will work for free. (Yeah, right) http://www.nesara.us/doverpts04/June_16_2004.htm is what I'm referring to if no one gets the joke.
Opensource innovates just as much as anything else. Everything from filesystems such as Riser to decenterlized p2p systems such as Gnutella or even bittorrent for that matter.
Did I miss the headline mentioning that sourceforge.net, Gnutella etc. became sentient and started producing things on their own?
Open-source is the name for a set of licenses which meet certain requirements. Individuals produce software, and choose to put some of that under open-source licenses. There is no open-source entity producing the software.
I'm not an open source/free software zealot, but Mr. Fleury seems to be ignoring an important point. Namely, that while individual developers are only going to give for free until they get tired of giving (this is true as it's a tautology), the "community" as a whole will continue giving. The power of OSS is in numbers. Once it reaches critical mass, it drives forward regardless of any single individual.
If OSS relied on any one developer, of course it would fail, and I think that is the mistake many detractors make in commenting about it. They fail to understand that OSS is greater than the sum of its parts.
Read the fucking article.
He's not calling all open source contributors "Hari Krishnas", he's calling the ones who heckle him at conferences "Hari Krishnas".
The best test of your belief in free speech is when someone says something you don't like.
The best test of free software is when someone does something with it that you don't like (e.g. making money).
This guy is following the license and spirit of the GPL, and making money doing it. People should be patting him on the back, not giving him a hard time.
1) Get some spare time
2) Fix bug annoying me
3) Submit fix for all
4) ???
5) Profit!
Obviously the OSS community needs to figure out the ??? bit and we'll be rich.
I like muppets.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that you can't scorn someone you're defeating in the marketplace just because you stole your ideas from them.
/. submission is based on a failure to understand human nature)
(i.e., this whole
If the OSS movement is ever to survive and become something more than a hippy hobbyist kludge then it needs hardnosed realists who can produce results, not just fire and brimstone ministers such as Richard Stallman.
Making money is not dirty, a profitable free software company is not a sell out, and yes professionalism in open source is something that should be encouraged.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
You are kidding right? That or your pretty wrong.
Microsoft and AOL have been adopting something called SPF that was originally presented by one of these F/OSS Hippies.
IIRC TCP/IP was originally developed in F/OSS software because it was Open.
Who did transparent GUI design?
Who first developed a XML based solution for the general group of Office Products?
Who developed and presented the rssmail whitepaper? Hippies or Suits?
What was the first tool for real time chat? IRC or AIM? Who developed it?
Was the first implimentation of a Web Browser (Mosaic) open source or coompany derived?
You forgot to wrap your comments in sarcasm tags or you are an idiot.
Many OSS projects out immotate [sic] or just immitate proprietary apps, but not all. Have you ever played with enlightenment (especially 17), amarok, vim, apache, apr, etc.?
"Since his stuff is Free (if it is) you can look at it as who cares?"
Funny you should mention that, while he is a two faced sleazeball, at least according to several friends who know him and some who used to work for him, he does indeed keep his work truly open. That is the beginning though, not the end. It was also built on the backs of free authors, at least one of which was a good friend.
Now, the trick they use is to purposely not document their work, it is free indeed, but just try to use it. Oh, you want support? Write a check to.....
Now, you have to remember this is the same guy who called Jonathan Schwartz "a ponytailed clown from McKinley". Now, good old JS does sport a ponytail, but the last time I saw him, the clown makeup was notably absent. Not sure about the McKinley bit though.
All this is second hand, but it comes from people who were starry-eyed groupies until they realized the intracicies of his 'management' style and told him where to cram his philosophy.
-Charlie
P.S. If you want stories about him, ask at TheServerSide.com, especially about posting under multiple pseudonyms to back up a failing arguement.
P.P.S In case you don't notice, I don't think highly of him, but I am one of the smiling happy people compared to those who know him.
Ah yes. Open Source THEFT-WARE. That's what it's all about.
mh...
Paradoxally it is easer to find people willing to work for free on difficult (and interesting) algorithms, than people willing write a lot of trivial code (like a gui :).
And this shows up a lot on linux, where we have a lot of very good but difficult to use programs.
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
Here is a link to a relevant page on the jboss site:
http://www.jboss.org/company/pos
So, he obviously seems to think you can make money writing "open source" software.
Lately, I am thinking that a more interesting question is one that should be on the minds of Free Software users...
What are some important factors that I should look at in assessing "the total development environment" of the software I am depending on?
all the best,
drew
http://yp.peercast.org/?find=bysa&Submit=Search
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
If you contribute code to the GPL, you have to realize that it might just be used by an asshole like this guy.
Of course it could also be used by terrorists, rightist wackjobs, leftist pinkos, separtist paritsans, guerilla insurgents and the North Koreans.
So think twice before contributing to projects like Freeciv or EMACS...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
"Was the first implimentation of a Web Browser (Mosaic) open source or coompany derived?"
It was definately not open source, Netscape(Mozilla) only became open source after IE bitchslapped it.
Everybody views the world through his own eyes. Some folks think that's the only view.
Even though I've used Linux since the early 1990s, I have always had Windows as my desktop at home - until last year. Microsoft had major trouble doing my wireless adapter, to where the Microsoft OS broke - then I tried to reinstall and it's new stupid OEM "recover" CDs (which are much worse than the old Microsoft Windows 95 install CDs) erased not only my C drive (which I expected), but my D drive (which I didn't expect - and it was erased to put only 3-4 files which were about 10 KB). I finally got tired of it and installed Debian Linux with GNOME. Have been very happy since. Am typing this on my Mozilla browser, which I prefer to IE for many reasons - tabs, no popups, remembering passwords, choice about cookies etc.
Nowadays Linux, GNOME and other free software projects are a mix - some of the contributions were free labor time, and some get paid to work by OSDL, Red Hat, IBM and so forth. I look at free software as a sort of socialist thing, and I see Linux deciding to work with IBM and companies like that in order to capture the high end market in the same way a member of the Communist Party of China might be a little worried about befriending the US and allowing foreign companies into the country as a method to achieve a betetr socialism. Well, even Lenin did a right turn with the New Economic Policy. Plenty of people who think like me are sort of trusting Linus and other people with this long march through the institutions, and comments like Mr. Fleury's heighten the worry. I for one will fight tooth and nail against the Fleury's, the Eric Raymonds and company coming and trying to begin, what in my mind is a setup for an enclosure of the commons. But in a sense Mr. Fleury is right, I am just a small little free software peon, this industry has always been meritocratic, and what the top programmers on important projects think is important as well. Which is probably why those who wish to do harm to the free software movement will target them. It's kind of like how big business targeted union leaders to destroy the labor movement, which worked pretty well in the USA, unionization of private business has gone from 35.7% in the 1950s to 7.9% nowadays. Engineers may always think of things as practicality, but people like Eric Raymond do not, and you must navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of practicality of politics. And sometimes it is necessary to slow down or halt progress on something due to the license being no good and whatnot. Neither Java not C# has a decent free software licensed product yet, although both are being worked on. I for one am cognizant that every time I run a non-free Java on my Debian, I am making a compromise. And I hope I will have a free Java soon, and I prefer using non-Java products until then unless absolutely necesssary. My refusal to use non-free products, my contribution to free software helps the rfee software movement, and stifles the non-free movement. Plus, I am not fanatical about it, I make exceptions, so I am not really effected negatively by it.
using GNU software is a great way show small and medium companies how to sever the ties with expensive to licence commercial software. It also has the effect of putting commercial software zealots out of work.
To me it's a win win situation.
Got hosting
I have to say, I'm really confused here. I've got this pay stub here which shows income sufficient to support myself, despite being still in school and only an intern, from an open source company. I've also got this company financial information and analyst opinions here, with the financials showing everything positive for the last two years, and average analyst opinions leaning about as far towards "buy" as I've ever seen for any widely-followed stock.
One of two things must be happening here. Either I have been hallucinating so completely for the last year of my life that I think I'm living well and employed while I'm actually in a padded room somewhere, or the JBoss founder is just full of shit. Since even severe schizophrenics capture enough information about their surrounding to at least vaguely know where they are (though it may confuse them due to conflict with their imagined world), Occam's Razor suggests that the JBoss founder is indeed full of shit.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
He would do better to seek out people who are professional Open Source Vendors like he is, and creative Open Source hobbyists, the kind that write compilers, work on web browsers, GUI toolkits, etc.
If he avoids talking to stupid people at conferences, but instead seeks out the smart group above, maybe his next interview won't have as much nonsensical chatter.
The comparison with Hare Krishnas (the spelling in the article is wrong) is lame. First of all Hare Krishnas are not hippies in all aspects but very conservative Hindu cult. And second, they definitely are not against paid work, although encouraging donations to their church in the form of money or labor. It is not any different from other religious organizations.
However, the comparison could be partially true. Nowadays people are becoming more distrustful towards organized religions, yet retaining the urge to work for attainment of lofty ideas for the general good. Often this is done as a charity work and if you can make the difference then why not. Why developers should be excluded from this aspect of human endeavors? There are a lot of things the money can't buy and inner fulfilment is one of them.
I once saw a poster that read:
This doesn't mean that you work for free, rather you work on something you enjoy enough that you are willing to work on it at home in some sense.Even if you can't do the same thing at home and at work is somewhat irrelevant.
I have yet to meet a CPA who is an advanced software developer in any language beyond Excel Macros. But then again, I haven't met every CPA in the world either. This isn't to slight them, but to point out that his logic is kind of fucked up when he says no one will work for free. That's why we have things like Clubs and Organizations surrounding any subject you wish, from LUGS to garden shows. They all impart their members efforts towards a goal of making that subject better. The alternative would be to pay someone to do it. But they would rather do it themselves.
Consider an organization like the Special Olympics. The people who contribute to that organization do not get paid for it. They do it out of that Hippie Love they have for the work they do. And it works and it has a net positive effect on society. In a sense, it is not a Zero Sum game.
It might be possible for him to make some points, but I think he is essentially an arrogant prick who believes more in the almighty buck than he does in his own humanity. There are those that believe money is the only path to true happiness, security, or self worth. Just as my ex-wife. But there are a lot of others, especially those with more experience and years, who will disagree with you and caveat that while money is not necessarily the root of all evil is certainly isn't going to gaurantee you satisfaction or self-worth.
All this guy is running into is the notion that some software that companies want developed won't get developed by Open Source community because it's something that is such a fucking bad idea that no one wants to touch it or there is no right solution and we are all better off doing it ourselves on a custom basis.
CRM is a good example of this. CRM is a product need designed by Marketing to sell a product when all it really is is a glorified address book / database that meets some but never all of your goals or objectives as a company.
Those companies that have a CRM requirement list that is so simple as to be handily met by the COTS CRM products will not impliment them. Rather they will simply purchase the services of a Call Center in India or the Phillipines to run all of it for them.
Oh my G-d the background has parallax effects! This is so innovative!! Enlightenment is useless, and even the author says so. It's basically a demo, like what we all made in the 80s.
you can't have a business model where you say, "Hey, guys, you write my software for me and then I'm going to make all the money off of it!"
...of course you can. Game publishers, book publishers, movie companies, tv stations, music labels and so on thrive on taking a "production" and delivering it to consumers. However, you do need to have some added value. Even though the applications are FLOSS there are many way to do that, I'm sure you can think of a few...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
But everybody needs to get paid. If the artist can't live off his work, he has to waste his time and energy on a day job -- not good for art.
... but let's leave that speculation for another thread.
This is the eternal dilemma.
Some lucky few artists find patrons, or markets for their work.
Most don't. Of these, some struggle on as best they can, some go without art altogether, some go mad with art or the lack of it.
I believe that the public at large, if polled, would agree: art is good for us, it enriches our souls, teaches us about ourselves.
But who should pay for this art -- the State?
True, 1920s poster art of the Soviet Union is spectacularly beautiful.
And some of the WPA works of 1930's America are breathtaking.
Let's be honest, Nazi graphic designers knew what they were doing; and among film-makers, Leni Riefenstahl towers alone as a immmortal genius of light and shadow.
I could go on, but my examples have reached their climax: for every work of art that someone admires, someone else burns with hatred for artist and artwork alike.
Who then shall fund the artist -- Corporations? All hail the Fedex Logo and the Michelin Man!
What's left? Do it yourself, any way you can -- or do without -- same as artists have always done. This may, possibly, be easier to do in the age of the internet
-kgj
-kgj
This guy sounds like a totally clueless corporate jerk.
A major reason that programmers created open source was to be able to have control of the tools that they use to create profit for their employers.
Computer systems are arbitrary and very complicated. Yet companies use programmers and information system professionals for ad-hoc tasks only to discard them like used tissues when the project is working. On the next project, the programmer is expected to master a completely different set of symbols (an operating system interface) before starting to do productive work.
Open source software is a means by which the productive members (i.e. the people who actually do the real work) of the IT community are forcing a standardization of corporate systems in order to greatly increase their productivity. Mastering one operating system means that the programmer/analyst/specialist doesn't have to waste time learning a new system with every project. Making the complicated software free forces the corporations to adopt the new standard OS on 'bottom-line' grounds. Having the source available and adaptable creates huge feedback loops which is the best way to find and remove deep bugs that always arise in a project of this magnitude.
This guy and all others like him in the managerial suites prove once again that engineers, programmers, and system specialists are simply smarter than they are. He should really 'just shut the fuck up' (a cute American expression meaning to restrain yourself from public displays of stupidity) and give quiet thanks that the people more intelligent than him continue to permit this illusion of managerial superiority.
This is one story.
Imagine a situation where you have some crappy 128kbps Internet link at home, and flat 1.5Mbps at your work? Just like every normal guy, you start your P2P client every Friday and then you pray during the weekend that your download goes Ok. With some help of port forwarding you could access your work machine... except that you don't have PCAnywhere or anything similar installed on one of the points. But if you could have a web access to your download client... Wait a minute, some commercial software like Kazaa must have such feature! No, it doesn't have it?!? Wait a minute, where from eMule copied that idea then?!?
No sig today.
Is this sarcasm? Copyright infringement is infringement, not theft, and even so, it is the people that commit the crime, the software isn't automated you know.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
So he meant SOCIALISM.
1) Astroturf wildly to market your product, on the assumption that your customers and fellow developers are idiots
2) Issue a mealymouthed pseudo-apology, when you get caught
3) Wait a year, then publicly call your fellow OSS developers "hippies" and "Hari Krishnas"
4) ??
5) Profit!!!
For those who jump to the conclusion that this guy is panning the concept of Open Source - it doesn't appear that he is. All he seems to be saying is that his business doesn't just distribute and support open source, it customizes it to fill clients' needs.
The "nobody works for free" comments were in the context of tailoring a product to add the features the customer wants - essentially his business seems to be to charge money to companies who want that done, by developing custom software built on an open-source foundation.
Yes, he does sound a little full of himself, but he's the founder of a start-up. What would you expect? Please just read and understand the interview before you start burning this guy in effigy.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
If you re-read his post, it clearly states that he wasn't interested in lining someone else's pockets, while he gets nothing. I see nothing wrong with this.
And thus we give artists money though various organizations and offer them jobs that do not distract them that much.
Ideal in theory; but in practice, I'm guessing (I don't know this for a fact) that only a small percentage of artists get any funding. I'm thinking here of the United States, where the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts is less than the budget for US military brass bands. (Literally -- figure from Harper's Index.) Moreover the NEA as an institution -- along with Public Television, etc. -- have powerful enemies.
-kgj
-kgj
It was released public-domain and it was developed in a research center. So you're still right, but I'm just being a nitpicker.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I'm not going to complain about your spelling, since you might not be a native English speaker.
On the other hand, you're just wrong.
>They do not innovate w/ new tech-ideas.
Yes, they do. For instance, did you know that the first web browser to do page layout decently (in an "innovative" fashion: you put the pictures in line with the text!) was called NCSA Mosaic. It was distributed with source code. A company called Spyglass bought the rights to it. Microsoft used Mosaic as the basis for IE. For reference, in your browser window, click "Help -> About IE".
The web site you're on now is being served by an open source product called Apache, which was based on the NCSA http server. Apache has many innovative features, not the least of which is its open architecture (making it possible for Apache to run programs written in several different programming languages).
The page layout of this site is done by a program called Slashcode, an open source program. Comment moderation, and meta-moderation, are two technical innovations that came from this open source package.
It's written in PERL, through the Apache mod_perl plugin. PERL was a truly paradigm-shattering open source programming language. PERL was designed for handling strings and administering computer systems. When the web exploded, PERL turned out to be almost perfectly suited to it. Even without the web, PERL is great for doing sysadmin work.
The list would go on, and on, and I am not doing it justice by listing only a few.
The point is that all of the really innovative stuff comes from open collaboration. Closed source people are forced to look at what the market wants, and with one finger in the air can't be truly innovative.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
I think he has a point. There there a reason why there have been so many interviews/articles recently about the long term feasiilty of open source, and that reason is that I'm not sure it can be assumed that all software projects can be open source. If if you look at the open source projects out there the ones that are used for mission critical purposes (web servers, database servers, etc) are not maintained by hobbiests, but by companies. Although this is 'technically' open source, it is certinly not the type of development that is meant by open source idealists. In fact, its really closer to 'free' software. In reality nobody is out there rewriting mysql, or PHP to suit their own needs. The fact that its open source is not the compelling factor; the fact that its free is.
Then if you look at pure hobbist open source projects, you get stuff like bit torrent clients, mp3 encoders, etc; stuff that we nerdy types are intersted in.
Who said we are working for free when what we are really doing is bartering.
I work on a video editor, or the docs for openoffice, or beta testing for Blender.
In return you do something similar.
In return, I get a $500 package (openoffice) free without needing to pay taxes.
In return, I get access to code that does 90% of what I want so I only have to write the 10% instead of 100%.
OSS moves ahead because it doesn't have to care about -cash- payments. It can take almost as long as it wants on any project and when it gets "good enough" then it starts eating into the commercial software it compets with.
I passed a key marker in the last 3 months - I no longer install Office on all my boxes. THat followed another key point 6 months ago when I said the default programs were Writer and Calc instead of Word and Excel.
Now I'm seriously looking at Umbuntu and it's very likely I'll be using it 100% on one box.
Anyway- back to my basic point- even businesses can benefit enormously from open source. They get access to code 90% written, write the 10% they need and contribute it back to the stream. This allows them to make deadlines they otherwise could not and to get software that works (bypassing a huge amount of risk) that they only have to tweak.
And some of them are STILL greedy and try to take the free code and hide their changes (fortunately they are getting busted lately).
It's not that hard folks- get thousands of dollars worth of free software- make your business profitable and give just a little bit back.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Okay, ignore the business aspect for a second, look at it from my (a developer's) point of view.
Before I got involved in OSS, I was yearning to get into consulting, but I couldn't seem to find a breakthrough job to establish a reputation. People just didn't want to believe I could do the work. I'm in the magical "recently graduated college" zone where I'm not expereinced enough to be senior but not young enough to be an undergrad consultant.
After I got involved and contributed to an open source project as one of the primary developers, suddenly I had exposure. Sure, I didn't get paid for the work (and we did a lot of work in just 2 months). But that investment has helped me to get a very good consulting job, and I've gotten a lot more exposure because people talk to me about the library and what it does.
It's the best thing to happen to my career since graduating college.
No one will work for free, but who said that we're working for free? I consider my OSS work to be an investment in my repuation and my future career. It certainly has paid off in a very short amount of time.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Almost every successful asshole does this. They ignore how fortunate they were (just out-and-out LUCKY) and attribute all their success to themselves. So you get stories of how they walked uphill, both ways, etc. Everyone else who hasn't pulled himself up by his bootstraps is a loser or "Hari Krishna" or whatever.
Edison did the same thing, bragging about how hard he worked and perspired, somehow missing the fact that he rode to success on the backs of many others. But don't be too hard on these guys. CEOs have to do this because they're constantly marketing themselves as well as their company and product(s).
No one is going to work for free. That's the myth of open-source.
My company works a lot on open source software. And we actually pay our developers to do so.
Is this a hippie dream? No, it's just practical. We use this open source software in our business because it is the best product available - and it's much less expensive and more robust than anything else on the market.
We continue to develop the software because we have needs that go beyond the current implementation. We give back to the community because we find it cost effective to have good business relationships with the other developers of the "product". If we have a problem, we can fix it ourselves, or we can ask our partners in the community.
It's a pretty simple concept, and it's all based in the finances of business.
To proclaim that Open Source is a hippie dream or an unworkable business model is simply incorrect. Maybe this guy simply fears that open source alternatives to his software may undercut his business.
If ESR wants to sit on the sidelines, burping out an occasional PNG library, and then bitch and moan about the inappropriateness of the GPL, this is going to piss me off a little. This is not productive.
But this JBoss guy? Well, he's actually doing something useful. He's advancing Java, Open Source, and computing in general. If he wants to speak out against something I agree with, well, I don't care. He's an actual positive force for open source software even if he's wrong, and he's earned the right to criticize.
Sorry, never heard of Marc Fleury nor JBoss. Is JBoss a clothing line or something?
Anyway, I suppose I could look him up, but if he's making these statements as if people should listen to him, shouldn't he kind of be a known person? I can make statements all day long too...but since I'm a nobody like this guy why should anyone listen to me? Why is anyone even reading this post?
Don't mod me as anything.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Without OSS, JBoss is just JB.
Well, the constitution favours Luxembourg very much. Europe is a job machine for persons from luxembourg. Regional politicians became high ranking well paid staff workers in the EU. People from a state that is a joke.
He's a business man, his concern is money. His target is enterprise and e-commerce. Who cares. Let him rant about OS. Leave the real innovation to OS.
I have nothing against Open Source. I just want to point out that people generaly have priorities. Do you think it's wrong to want a job that pays good so you can support a family? If you answer "yes" then you are an insensitive clod who thinks that volunteerism should be everybody's top priority.
:o)
The world works on money. The electric company is not going to accept your OSS as payment. They want money. Until you change that don't be hating on people that have to put making money above volunteerism.
--
This post will get modded down because it comes across as "abrasive" just like Marc Fleury did in his JBOSS story. Oh well
I had never thought about it that way, but now I think you are quite correct. Thanks for the post.
Hey, 1990 called. They want their open-source-failure theory back!
The "hippies" writing OSS were not as charitable as you suggest. Many were getting paid or compensated, just not by their software customers. A cushy academic job where you get to choose you own area of research and/or projects, a student working school project, etc.
I'm not saying people did not give away code they wrote on their own time, I did, so did others, it just wasn't called OSS in the 80s and early 90s. However a lot of open source software was and is subsidized one way or another.
the first tool for real-time chat was the unix app "talk"
There are other valid reasons for doing open source (both Free Software or Open Source) development. I live in a remote area and need to attract consulting work. Although I enjoy sharing my open source and open content works with others, to be frank, I am also motivated to spend perhaps 300 hours a year writing "free" stuff to attract people to my web site and thus attract consulting work.
There is another side to open source software: as a consultant, it is a huge win having free platforms like Jakarta Tomcat, JBoss, Ruby on Rails, etc. for building applications for customers. Money not spent on infrastructure software is money that businesses can use for hiring consultants, hiring more internal staff, etc.
I wrote a web blog a couple of weeks ago, poking a little fun at Mark Fleury because of his comments on the open sourcing of the GlueCode J2EE stack (which is very nice, BTW).
-Mark
makes the case that "no one is going to work for free."
For those of you who aren't familiar with Marc Fleury, he is the stereotype of the maveric, much like many of us. He's used to being the smartest guy in the room, he's used to being right whenever someone disagrees with him, and he doesn't soft peddle the fact that he thinks he's always right. There's an upside and a downside; people don't follow the wishy washy, but maverics tend to come off as assholes.
All that to say, this is just vintage Marc. His view is the only credible view in his world. It has cost him some important allies (eg: his entire core development team last year), and has won him others (eg: lots of venture capital). It will continue to be his hallmark.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
"Elite" and "Java" do not belong in the same sentence.
Listen you insolent wag; clearly you suffer from delusional episodes. Your kind will fade, and in the mean time provide food for the strong. I will roast your stomach over a pit of embers as the righteousness of Mohammad sweeps the land.
I guess if you do a good job crimping your own network cable, that's art too? Ugh.
... intentional pattern of bytes, not that? Who is to say: You over here are an Artist, but You over there are not ... ?
.... artful, those turtles.
Yes, crimping cables well is art. So is crimping cables badly, although I might call it bad art.
My definition of art:
When a man acts with intent -- when the motives of his soul are brought into the world through the actions of his body -- that is art.
I'll spare you the details of how I arrived at this thesis, other than to ask:
Q: Who is to say, This painting is Art, but that painting is Not Art? This chair is Art, but not that? This architectural blueprint, but not that? This poem but not that? This song, not that? This
A: Not you, brother; nor me either. Alternately: all of us. In any case, It's All Art.
I'll be the judge of what I consider good art and bad art. You do the same. It's all art -- including rhetoric, the art of expressing ourselves.
We live in a continuum of creation which informs the ways our souls express themselves, much as unified field theory informs time and space. "Turtles all the way down"
-kgj
-kgj
Example:
Timemachine is a small JACK application that records the previous 10s of audio from any JACK input. There is absolutely nothing like this in any commerical audio software AFAIK, and certainly nothing with the cross-app flexibility of a JACK-based application.
"Why don't you interface with my ass...by biting it!" -Bender B. Rodriguez
Shouldn't this be titled
JBoss Founder Hard-Nosed About -COMMERCIAL- Open Source
???
So one fucking guy has a problem with commercial open source, big fucking deal. Okay everybody, just stop writing software. RMS, you too. Pack it up.
The NEA as an institution-- along with Public Television, etc.-- made powerful enemies. Didn't have to be that way, but there's always a prick with an agenda in any crowd.
Good point. I didn't mean to praise the NEA, nor defend NEA shortcomings -- I'm not plugged into their politics, don't follow their issues. (I certainly don't want anything to do with crucifixes-in-urine, nor with campaigns against crucifixes-in-urine -- my God, that rates down there with OJ and Schiavo, in terms of loathsome media spectacles.)
What I meant to express was my skepticism for the idea of state-sponsored institutions getting much done.
-kgj
-kgj
you need to come to Houston then and see the Orange Show Art Car parade -
http://www.orangeshow.org/artcar.html
http://www.orangeshow.org/vote2005/gall_001.php
Or better yet if you can't make it to the parade come to the museum http://www.artcarmuseum.com/
Clearly this man never studied economics, because he fails to recognize that money, by itself, is not a motivator of economic activity (such as expenditure of personal time or paid development resources). Money is merely convertible into utility, and it is utility which drives economic activity. People generally start F/OSS projects for one of two reasons:
A) The software will do something for them that is economically beneficial.
B) The software will do something for customers that the customers are willing to pay money for, because it is economically beneficial for them.
There's no charity here, except as a welcome and encouraged side-effect. Sure, plenty of projects begin as exercises in curiosity, but anything you hear about has been developed to maturity because it was economically worthwhile for several people to spend valuable resources improving it. One of the critical strengths of F/OSS is that it allows distant people who individually lack the resources to implement a solution to their common problem to tackle it together and get a result. It also enables people who *have* the resources to pool them to get a *better* solution. That's why you see all of these competing hardware companies working together on Linux. They realize that hardware is only good if you've got software to run on it, and it's better for all of them if the software developers are working on one OS that's good on all these platforms, rather than each having to maintain their own proprietary unix.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
I think all of your examples *can* be art, but aren't necessarily so (or even "typically" or "usually" so).
Limiting art to only encompassing paintings, movies, music or sculpture is pretty restrictive.
For that matter, take your "music" example... Is all music automatically "art"? I'd argue that it depends on how seriously the musician takes his/her work. It's one thing to have a working/functional knowledge of singing or songwriting - but another to put real effort into making a song "your own expression". Would you say Brittney Spears is a true "artist"? I wouldn't. I'd argue she was simply interested in finding a fast track to fame and fortune, and used the medium of popular music as the vehicle to get there. How about Milli Vanilli? Put out lots of very popular music and made lots of money, but didn't even use his own material to do it!
I see software coding as the same thing. If you're just putting in your time at your job, coding whatever you're asked to code - then no, that's just "work", not "art". But if you're inspired by the challenges and restrictions imposed upon you by a device, and create your own game or application that pushes the limits of device (quite possibly through using very creative tricks you came up with yourself) - why isn't that "art"?
(Personally, I think it's much harder to claim "art" when developing on a dominant, fairly mature platform like Windows - because you're probably re-using a lot of "canned" code and published API calls, etc. Where you really see developers speak of elegant code and art is on such things as Palm PDAs with limited CPU power, screen resolution, and input options. Or perhaps the first coders to explore the limits of a particular console system after it's first released.)
You're stupid. His company pays people to work on open source. He makes a lot of money doing that. He's saying that it's a myth that people working for free are creating high quality documented and qa'ed code. Indeed, pretty much every useful open source project is funded by large companies.
No one likes them though. They make an ass look bigger than it really is, and there are better products available for free.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
or as we like to call it within IT at major fortune 500 company....tomcat+unneededcrap.org
I challenge jboss to rip out the hippie guts of their product, fire all the former hippie employees they've collected and try to sell the remaining 10% of their product.
Apache made a horrible mistake when they allowed jboss to have anything to do with tomcat. jk1 has been the most feature fluxed project I've seen. Rarely do you see 2-3 complete behavior changes in a minor 'patchlevel' increment.
I wish apache 2.1 would hurry out of alpha with its ajp connector and strict release controls so we could rid ourselves of jk1. the thing simply is not designed for the enterprise level server environment nor is it tested in such an environment by jboss.
Can open-source accomplish anything? Absolutely. Is it different from commercial software in bad ways? Yes, some. Good ways too. OS's biggest bugaboo is that it tends to be less user-friendly, since the people who work on it aren't being paid to cater to newbies. Also, projects sometimes fall into the doldrums when coders move on, though that's rare with popular packages. But all in all we've all seen through experience that open-source can compete and has successfully competed with some commercial projects.
The build tool that JBoss use was built by us hobbiests. I hope a product built by "amateurs" with no support other than the user mail list and the defect tracking site is not so low quality that it isnt up to the 'commercial' needs of teams like JBoss. If it aint, well, they are free to fork it and do their own implementation ---let's see how far they get.
I am really pissed off with the "amateur" quote. Ant was built by its end users, but they were software developers, each solving their own little problem. As most software dev problems are common, the tool shares out. but amateur? Software professional in their spare time is more accurate.
If there is one thing that OSS has shown, it is that
1. full time software teams do not produce better quality products than the amateurs (example: Linux v. windows)
2. end user involvement produces products that meet user needs far better than a marketing department telling engineers in cubicles what to do.
Imagine if Ant was a private company. We'd have to have meetings with the VCs. We'd have a marketing department. We'd have to deliver things on deadlines, whether they were ready or not. And we' d have to convince the world we were better than a planet full of software developers collaborating to solve their own problems, and sharing the results. This is what jboss are like: they have to slag off the rest of the OSS community, to justify their very existence.
-Steve
At least he is being quoted as himself this time, rather than yet another JBoss astroturfing...
(yeah, cheap shot, but not as cheap as the barrage of JBoss "enthusiast" posters back in the day...)
Let me first say that I am a huge proponent of the open source movement. Yet, allow me to be a realist for just a second; the key to encouraging successful long-term open source development and deployment (necessarily including comprehensive support and QA) is an adequate incentive structure - no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Some would argue, perhaps rightly so, that meritocracy systems, goodwill, and/or self interest - all without monetary incentive - suffice to encourage successful open source production. While I agree that these are all extremely powerful incentives currently motivating amazing development, I do not think that open source will ever pose a comprehensive threat to closed source powerhouses (think Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, etc.) without introducing competitive monetary incentives.
Without debating the merits and pitfalls of capitalism here, there can be little disagreement that we do in fact live in a capitalist society necessitating a certain degree of capitalist methodology. In today's world, companies need to attract and retain the best and brightest, and to do so, they need to write employees a competitive pay-check.
With all this said, I believe that there are reasonable ways to monetize open source without destroying its ideological and developmental benefits, so I see little reason to bash money-making qua money-making.
I saw nothing offensive in that interview, except maybe BusinessWeek quoting him out of context for the article's title.
2005, and people still don't get this.
The law is open source, as is medicine. Far as I know doctors and lawyers still make a (quite good) living.
If you **still** have trouble seeing how this can also be applied to the field of software development then you really **should** get hold of a copy of the "OpenSources" book and read Bob Young's bit, especially the "ketchup" analogy....
Which do you want to be? The former pays the bills.
Most businesses would be insane to rely on open source programmers to develop their software for them... that's why many of you reading this still have a job developing commercial software or in-house homegrown software. They give you money, you develop software that they want.
I get paid to develop in-house software. To save time and money, my boss has chosen that we take a bunch of Open Source projects (such as FreeRADIUS, ChilliSpot, and Zebra) and build on top of them. While putting the pieces together, we (the programming team) found bugs in these software, and missing features. And because we have a strong incentive to get things fixed/written (deadline!), so we reported bugs promptly, and helped fixing them. We also helped started writing the features that we want.
In the end, we are able to produce a much more robust, solid product, in much much less time + money, because we were building on top of the Open Source projects. And during the development stage, these projects also benefit from us in forms of bug fixes and new feature implementation, and at the end, we even convinced our accounting department to give some donation (tax write-off!) to some of the projects.
I'd say it's a win-win situation.
Spare change, since there is no end to the number of people who are willing to pay for small-time open source support and I have all the tools at my disposal to profit from that
Relaxation after work, since there are no deadlines to meet and no job to be lost if productivity goes down, allowing me to explore more playful aspects of whatever I'm working on. Experimentation only costs me my spare time but reaps rewards in finding new and more efficient methods or methods that reap higher quality product.
Honing skills, I can't count the number of technologies and ideas I've been exposed to through reading open source code, man pages, research papers, hardware specs, etc.
Empowerment, I like to know that I can in fact make a difference that will last by contributing to an open source project, at least until the 2.0 rewrite ;) And in general, I like being able to participate in bringing what I feel is superior technology to a wider audience, and hopefully replacing what I feel is inferior technology in the long run.
I can't think of anything else at the moment but that's a start.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
Free in what context? There is more of value in life than simply dollars and cents. Self-respect, the respect and admiration of others, the ability to contribute to something that will positively change the lives of tens, hundreds, possibly thousands (or even millions) of people.
This man is a greedy bastard, and a foolish one at that. He only sees the bottom line in dollars and cents. Who respects him, who he is able to respect, and what goodwill he has demonstrated to his fellow man...these things don't even register in this guy's head.
It isn't that no one is going to work for free. It's that no one who believes that money is the only way to be paid, that wealth is only measured in dollars and cents--it's that no one who believes those things will work for free. And that's fine, because they're capitalists to the core and they don't even have the single shred of communism in them which is required to get behind open source. Fuck 'em, we don't want their "free" labor anyhow. The only free labor we want is that which is voluntary and comes from people who recognize that there's more to life than money.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
A variety of sources like we had 20 years ago seems best. We have a great deal of "popular art" being funded by corporate America (popular music, television, movies...). We have a "prestige art" being funded by the American Aristocracy and government (museums, opera houses, PBS) which emulates classic funding. We had mid range art being sold to middle class households.
... it's way too soon to assess whose Century this is, although we surely live in an age of hyperbolic change.
....
Well said; I agree.
But that was the twentieth century -- America's Century. The twenty-first
Time to say goodbye to some old expectations, get on with the business of the future, maybe find ways to make art via PayPal or whatever
-kgj
-kgj
I have read in the past about employees at JBoss talking-up their product on programming message boards, touting it's superiority over other application servers. Basically since then I have a hard time swallowing any news coming from a company that is willing to promote itself with those kinds of tactics.
Actually if there was a Hare Krishna in the audience, he'd be passing out flowers and collecting donations for the open source temple.
I used to agree with you.
However, I have come to realize that if something is important, such as QA, documentation writing, etc. that someone will always either be willing to do it for a "thank you" note on the web site (prestige) or a customer will always be willing to pay for it.
Open source works on a very simple premise: it is often more efficient to distribute the cost of development to an on-demand model than it is to do the development of subsequent versions and distribute the cost via license sales. Commissioning of features or add-ons to open source projects is an area I expect to be fairly lucrative in the future. In fact, this is a large portion of what my company does. I don't care if everyone downloads my patches/add-ons/software projects free of charge. Maybe one of them will say "Hey, this does 90% of what I need, but..." Then I can charge them for the other 10%. If several people want that other 10% I can split the cost among them.
This can then be released in the next version or as a separate add-on.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
your first example isn't any good. A vast majority of Linux has been done by paid developers for some time. Of course, the community is invaluable in that they are willing to do a great deal of bug testing and correct small problems(which is very important), but the leaps have been driven in the last 8 or so years starting wtih RedHat and now several companies.
The second point you make really is a moot point, think about open source. 99% of the stuff is written for the people who are writing it. of course they are going to know what they want, but then again, the target audience usually remains incredibly small.
The amateur quote you are pissed about is probably an interpretation thing. I figured what he meant was exactly what you say he did, programmers doing it in their free time. That still makes them amateurs!! its the definition of the world. Being involved in an area and not getting paid. Think amateur figure skater who gets a gold at the olympics, are they somehow an inferior group to profressional figure skaters?
I don't think this guy feels that open source is a bad model, just that to become COMMERICALLY VIABLE a project needs to get funding. All he means is its the next step. VLC is the best media player I have ever used and I think the world of the people willing to take the effort to program something so good. But that doesn't mean it can begin to compete with WMP(which I hate, and I'm not implying that the project ever needs to do this) unless the development fundamentally changes to address the needs of people who don't know anything about the project. For those things, corporations and marketting departments are worth their weight in gold.
I've actually had to deal with the JBoss guys on several occasions (I brought them in to compete for a few bids at my company), and I can't stand them. They are the least responsive vendor I have ever seen, and that's saying something. They're more arrogant and confrontational than Reuters or Bloomberg, and that's an almost miraculous achievement.
I am glad that they have succeeded, as if JBoss does for app servers what Linux did for Operating Systems, that will be a good thing. Unfortunately, I see a rocky future for them, probably. It seems that if you want to use the service business model, telling your customers to screw off at every opportunity is not a good plan, and it will hurt you eventually.
I also think their focus is slightly misplaced, but that's a minor technical issue. Presumably it will be fixed as JBoss becomes more mature. With a little time, hopefully by JBoss 5.0, they'll have a much more impressive AS, with fewer weakpoints. Perhaps then they can really strive to fix the few weaknesses they have.
According to your definition, almost all activities of man are art. By diluting a word to apply to everything, you make the word worthless.
Yes, my definition explicitly covers almost -- all? -- activities of man as art. That's my intent, that's how I like it.
Dilute the meaning of the word? Yes, but for a good cause -- in the same way that "love" is diluted word, meaning anything and nothing, which we use because it fulfills our needs. As need be, we can always speak of "young love", "new love", "unrequited love", "foolish love", etc., crafting endless nuances from adjectives. For substance, though, we endlessly re-use the same short sweet powerful noun, love.
I demand not only that all of man's works -- including administration of government -- be treated as art; I further demand that all men see themselves, and each other, as artists.
Why? To meet my final demand: that all men learn to judge for themselves whether this art is good, this art is bad, that art is useful, and so on, until we are able to judge: is this man good or evil? will that course of action cause great good or great suffering?
-kgj
-kgj
Not exactly, Ant was originally the build tool inside of Tomcat. Tomcat was originally written at Sun Microsystems. Later, the two were seperated. While there are "hobbiests" I'd suggest the greatest majority of Ant contributors are part time folks who contribute because nearly every Java project on the planet uses Ant and they fix what they need to fix or add what they need to add. The most noted contributors write books and give talks on ant and receive *some* form of compensation. Having lived on both the Apache and "professional" side of open source, I can tell you I never did it "for free". I did it for career enhancement, some consulting money, to make my life easier. Sure I had non-monetary motives some of the time (its just way more enjoyable to work in open source), but the monetary motivations were always there. While I don't personally think the SingleCo/codebase model is the ONLY model, its certainly a model of open source.
You are quite right. In-use means success.
This guys seems to think success of open source is when hobbyists work for free, and failure is when companies work for free [by paying their staff to do open source instead of something else].
When a company works for free, surely that is the bigger success, a company decides more on the balance sheet than hobbyists who decide based on hobby.
If open source profits companies, then it is success by his own terms!
This guy wants the companies that work on open source for free, to out-source it to his company instead.
But isn't the whole success of open source where companies work for free precisely because it suits them better than the traditional alternative?
He's nuts.
Sam
[Company works for free is means the company wasn't paid to do it, just like hobbyists work for free means the hobbyist wasn't paid to do it. The fact that the company pays the workers is as relevant as the hobbyist eating to feed his body]
blog.sam.liddicott.com
The professional programmer working on a project on the side "for free" is still a professional programmer, not an amateur. That said, there is nothing wrong with "amateur". There's also nothing about Open Source that says it should, or is likely to be, primarily produced by unpaid volunteers. It can be a purely self-interested economic decision by a company to use and produce Open Source software.
You forget that developers who are makign the contributions are the same ones who used to do it for free.
Bottom line is writing code takes time and money. There is no free lunch.
... no more profit in this sector for software. So, basically the government is paying for it .. I mean you and me if your talking about donations.
.. well .. your money.
... ya people took it hook, line and sinker.
The corporations will give a donation and get a tax deduction from it. Sort of like giving to charity. The corporation gets the code and the tax deduction. The only problem is that software market gets screwed in the process. Thus, it turns into a tool for the 'service' industry
Or how about your college prof involved in an open source project. Now the government is subsidizing the work directly.
Well, if your working yourself on your spare time its
Meanwhile, all the 'service' jobs get outsourced. Welcome to the new world, congratulations.
As a business model, in a vacuum, open source does not really add up. It only really works if its subsidized by a service industry/government. Sad part is its the programmers who get screwed out of their money for their labor and then have their governments taxes raided with deductions from the charitable giving. Meanwhile, promote a propaganda campaign to make working for free look cool
People pay a lot for free software, but it is in labor and time costs to get custom products to work the way you want them to rather than in license costs. Which is good because free software is like the free labor market.
For example, yeah you can't "own" people as slaves, and maybe the plantation system had no "incentive" to produce cotton without them. But to assume that labor couldn't be used productively unless the masters had that incentive motive is silly. I think in 100 years, people will look at owernership of software in the same way. There is far more money to be made by using the free information, than in controlling it, and that's why free software is really more free market than closed software.
would you rather be a hippie and be a legend like Stallman http://www.stallman.org/ or be snobby and rich like Marc Fleury http://www.jboss.com/company/management ...
although both their looks took a hell of a bitting through fame and fortune, i wouldn't mind swapping my boyish cute looks and charming personality with any of those two dudes.
-mod me as funny, there will be a hell to pay-
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
Ant came from Sun employees originally.
Different cases, sure, but the same short-sightedness and same origins - the "I'm better than you, 'cos I'm richer".
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...at hobbyist, hippie projects like Geronimo, that dare to offer "competition" to his product, even to the point of passing all the relevant certifications?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
James Duncan D. only wrote Ant to make Tomcat open source; they used Make inside Sun. So it was created by a Sun employee for a goal, but it has been OSS for its entire life.
As the author of the best selling ant book, I have probably received most compensation in that direction, but even after three years, the revenue has still not justified the hours in writing the book. I think I earned $1000 last quarter, before tax. None of the other contributors active write now are authors, some do other products that live in the OSS build chain.
The primary way I get reward for working on ant is this: the projects I work in come in on time. Ant is only one of the tools and processes needed to manage this, but it helps.
There is one IDE person on the team, primarily because netbeans were submitting so many patches related to documentation that nobody could keep up. IBM/Eclipse provide some performance tuning too, but dont have commit rights. And we ignore their complaints that ant is broken on Win98, because we dont think anyone should be using win98 any more.
"then I'm going to make all the money off of it!"
Game publishers, book publishers, movie companies, tv stations, music labels and so on usually have to pay someone for what they use.
Dude needs to chillax and smoke a bowl I say
and you need to read and understand the article rather than the idiotic slashdot summary - preferably before you touch your bowl...
nothing but an arrogant fool. when linus first started the linux kernel was he being paid? OIC suddenly he needs to STFU because for a large part of it's development the linux kernel was just one of those hobbies.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
In the absence of formal qualifications for software dev the way there is for, say, plumbing or surgery, you could argue we all all amateurs. The only issue is then whether we are volunteers or paid.
one interesting feature about some communities is the amount of contribution by non-programmers. I'd point to Celestia as an example here; whoever provides the planet designs there are artists, not programmers. Perhaps for the OSS methodology to go mainstream, we have to appeal to more end users.
If you don't get it, why don't you try reading the article? That may be a start...
On my web site, I have a number of small software "tools". The usual sort of motley collection that a lot of programmers have. Scripts in various scripting languages. Real programs in random languages. library routines. Since I've done a lot of work in C, I have a sizeable C debugging package that I've collected/written. It's pretty much all labelled as "open source", GPL or otherwise.
;-), I can easily just download something and use it.
My primary motive for putting it online is that I find myself working on lots of different computers, and I often find myself wanting one of the tools in my collection. Now that Internet access is becoming universal (at least wherever there's a computer
So, for my primary (selfish) purpose, I could claim that this collection of open-source software is successful. I can access it when I need it.
There's also another benefit of putting it online. Other programmers find it and download stuff. Occasionally I get email from them with patches. I thank them and add their changes to my collection. I do the same for them of course, since a lot of my stuff came from other programmers' online collections.
This is clearly a benefit to all of us. So as a way of developing and enhancing such a collection, putting it online as open source is successful. It leads to occasional improvements in such collections.
Now, it's obvious that, from a commercial perspective, this hasn't been "profitable". I haven't made any money from sales at all. However, I have enhanced my own value as a programmer. Various employers have been duly impressed by my collection. I do point out that I will use any of my stuff on their projects, but any enhancements that I make will go back into my collection (which I carefully keep separate from the code I'm developing for them). So far no employer has had a problem with this. They're all smart enough to understand how they profit from such practices.
I think that a lot of the disagreement here is the common understanding of "success" as "profitable sales". But there are other kinds of profit, and other kinds of success. I doubt if any of the tools in my collection could be sold commercially. Most people would be baffled by a description of almost everything there, since most of it makes sense only to programmers or system managers. There's little point in attempting to make it commercial, as few computer users would ever buy any of it. But I'd claim that it's a "success" at what it's there for.
So should we programmers not be permitted to put useful stuff online unless it's commercially successful? This strikes me as rather foolish.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
He gets a few million in VC money and he thinks he's Bill Gates.
Nothing he said hasn't been refuted before.
Nothing to see here but another prima donna. Oh, wait, maybe he CAN compare himself to Bill Gates on that basis.
Move along.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Blah, blah, blah.
Just another soulless, scorched earth capitalist. "I relied on other people to make my money, but now, due to the frailty of my own nature, I'm now going to promptly forget what made me a millionaire in the first place, and get down to the usual millionaire activity of destroying the lives of as many people as I possibly can."
And before I get yet another barrage of comments from American reactionaries labelling me a Communist, let me say that I have nothing whatsoever against capitalism, provided that the capitalist in question remembers that they do not exist in a vacuum...that they're part of the larger human race...also that they actually need other people to get their money in the first place. It is capitalism with total disregard for others that I have major problems with. Mind you, the latter is the form that most Americans are familiar with anyway, so I stand corrected...a lot of you probably won't be able to tell the difference.
His points were:
/. editors actually read the article to see if the teaser was in keeping with the actual text; then again why change now.
1. If all your doing is distroing Linux, it's ahrd to compete on anything but price. Give it away for free, and hope you get enough servcie contracts to make money - but you can't charge more than Red Hat or you'll lose busienss; and that the percentage of people who buy servcie contracts is small so you need a large user base to keep any significant number of vendors in the black.
2. He used the term "Hare Krishnia" to describe those that think making money off of OSS is bad and take potshots at those who do- not as a general indictement of OSS developers. He also point sout when he asks them have they contributed to OSS the answer generally is no.
3. He point sout there are people who do it for free for the passion thay have for OSS; and that only a handful of developers are good enough to really write great code - such as those that maintain the Linux kernel.
His model is to develop and support applications for business, do real QA and make sure things work so a businss has a solution - not something they must compile and modify to get some sembelance of a working system. Not an unuasula way to make money - offer a service and be good at it.
He goes on to say he sees more top-down OSS adoption than the old bottom - up sneak it in approach of the past. Soemthing that portends good things for OSS.
It would be nice if
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Listen.
I'm about as borzhwa as they come.
I spend about 3-6 hours per week working on my yard.
My motivation?
I want my house and my yard to look nice.
Who benefits?
My neighbors who try to sell their houses, it increases neighborhood property values. Do *I* get any kickbacks? Are you shitting me? People do things for reasons other than personal profit all the fucking time.
I benefit, with pride, and personal satisfaction.
I see no difference between my decadent motivations, and the Open Source movement.
This guy's just a "Free Market" capitalist ideologist. Ideology seldom has anything to do with the real world.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
People choose art over money in the software world so they can do whatever they want with their projects.
Yes, this is congruent with my definition of art -- the soul of the artist wishes to do.
-kgj
-kgj
I am really pissed off with the "amateur" quote. Ant was built by its end users, but they were software developers, each solving their own little problem. As most software dev problems are common, the tool shares out. but amateur? Software professional in their spare time is more accurate.
I agree completely. Scientists, software professionals and others write software in their spare time, as well as self-taught tinkerers and similar folk. Many people who were once in the latter group are later in the first group - and vice versa. PEOPLE write software!
Nothing, really NOTHING says that a company that places distinct labels onto 'products' and talks about 'business', makes pretty foldouts etc. somehow produces 'better', 'more mature' or 'more professional' products.
[Rant: IMHO, this POV is closely related to the general obedience of many people and the far-reaching influence over them by fine rhetoric, glossy brochures and similar stuff.]
I'd say that if I write my software for myself (and maybe a couple of other people), I run a 100% customer-oriented business
I think all of your examples *can* be art, but aren't necessarily so (or even "typically" or "usually" so). Limiting art to only encompassing paintings, movies, music or sculpture is pretty restrictive.
... take your "music" example... Is all music automatically "art"?
... if you're inspired by the challenges and restrictions imposed upon you by a device, and create your own game or application that pushes the limits of device (quite possibly through using very creative tricks you came up with yourself) - why isn't that "art"?
... inspired art, which I admire.
... to do which, we need the continuum of art, the common medium of exchange: it's all art, all men are artists. Everything we do, matters: let us do the best we can to express the motives of our souls.
You've touched the heart of what has shaped my opinions: restrictive definitions of art.
Yes, it is, per my definition of art.
I understand your argument. I've been there, I've made similar arguments. But I keep coming back to this belief -- that I do a man wrong when I tell him he is not an artist, that his work is not art. I do not wish to be such a man, because I do not wish to be so treated myself.
Better that I have the courage to say: We are all artists, and I don't like your art, it's bad art, evil art, commercial radio pablum elevator Muzak art, whatever.
Coding is art, no question. And if it's inspired, as you suggested, then it's
But there are many artists, widely recognized as such, whose works I do not admire. One man's inspired is another man's insipid. We speak here of opinions, which we all have (or ought to have, and are entitled to).
We must each of us judge inspiration for ourselves
-kgj
-kgj
What really irks me is the use of the word "amateur". WTF does he mean by that? The word implies "not an expert". But he applied to an important developer. So does he mean "someone who does something because he enjoys it", ie a hobbyist? Oh well, he just throws in some hari krishna BS to cover it. "Amateur" is a poor word to use, at least the way he used it. The arcticle reads like a troll aimed at CIOs... "Yeah, I started in mommys basement, but I figured out how to make a profit, and then, like, I was flying my rich ass around in Europe and I was tired, but I came to the conference anyway, and you're just dirty hippies. Yeah, bitches." He might have a successful company, but his attitude sucks.
It is Hare Krishna or the Hare Krishna Movement...the International Society of Krishna Consciousness and not Hari Krishna.
FYI - Krishna is a Hindu god, an avatar of Vishnu, the preserver of the universe. The other two major gods are Brahma, the lord of creation and Shiva, the lord of destruction.
Tat Tvam Asi
I strongly agree that a more capitalist-inclined incentive structure is needed, given the realities of Now. That means that for massive, collaborative efforts to really mature, capital in the form of monetary compensation and benefits must be amassed and distributed on a per-role basis.
I do believe we're starting to see open source pose serious threats to these powerhouses you mention but, yes, the most successful of these are in fact strengthened by financial incentive (borne of self-interest) -- be it IBM contributing salaried developers to Linux development, or Mozilla able to employ core developers by way of startup funds from Netscape and corporate contributions, or Google hiring Firefox developers and allowing them to continue their work there.
Self-interest is as good of a motivator as any -- open source exists because enough people believe the given product represents significant value to them, and they have the means by which to make it happen together. But the corporate world is far more attractive for self-interest reasons as well -- hell, I'd love to get free massages and lunch in Mountain View, CA.
If anything, the current state of open source demonstrates the Power of Us. As our ability to collaborate en masse matures, it represents new possibilities for every tenet of life, right down to the economic systems that power our productivity.
So while I believe we must marry the ideology behind open source with real incentives for today, I do not rule out the nature of these incentives being radically different for tomorrow.
--Dave
1. full time software teams...
2. end user involvement...
Rants crack me up!
It's ironic that he calls the idea of people working for nothing a myth but uses a myth to prove it:
"At top of the pyramid, you have these top 2% of developers that are 10 times -- in some cases 100 times -- more productive than the rest."
This is a very popular myth with rathy shaky evidence. Even the most modestly talented develper can write one line of code in 15 seconds. Who do you know that can write 100 lines of code in 15 seconds? Of course any meaningful measure of productivity would go beyond LOC, but that just weakens the case further since there are no established standards for comprehensive software productivity. We can't define productivity in any meaningful way, but we make broad claims about it anyway.
My joke is that 98% of developers believe that they are in the top 2%.
"no one is going to work for free." sure not. but to some people there's more than money to succes. think famous. think peer appreciation. think self-importance.
Bad example - many of the people who wrote Ant were employees of Sun or other companies, who paid their paychecks and let them open source the contributions ( for various reasons ). Ant started as a by-product of another (initially) corporate-funded project, tomcat.
The point that Marc is making is very true, and most of Apache projects are proof of this. Many of the people who contribute to apache are paid to do this, by IBM, Sun, Novel, smaller companies supporting open source, people who convinced their employers it's good to contribute, etc.
Of course, it's stupid to say 'allways' or 'never' - there are projects where the authors make no money, but they tend to end up unsupported as soon as the author needs a real job to pay bills.
Jboss does one great thing - it hires a lot of open-source developers, so they can continue working on it. Sun and IBM, or the Mozilla Foundation are doing a similar thing.
Fact is - you can't spend many hours working on an open source project if you have a real and demanding job.
Sendmail predates Sendmail Inc, bind predates the ISC and the Berkely CSRG had no profit motive (a company that did, BSDi, was formed by some CSRG alumni but it failed).
The amateur quote you are pissed about is probably an interpretation thing. I figured what he meant was exactly what you say he did, programmers doing it in their free time. That still makes them amateurs!! its the definition of the world. Being involved in an area and not getting paid. Think amateur figure skater who gets a gold at the olympics, are they somehow an inferior group to profressional figure skaters?
If a figure skater get paid for figure skating they are professional even if they enter into a skating event where they don't get paid. As far as Olympics is concerned it's no longer amateur sports. If I recall right in the last two or three Olympics the US had professional basketball players on the US team. What gets me is that the International Olympics Committee disqualified Jim Thorp's gold metals years after he won them in track and field because he got paid to play baseball one summer. Eventually the IOC restored them posthumously. I won't even mention other instances where the IOC disqualified some because they didn't have the right karotypes. The Olympics is no longer about amateur sports it's about big business.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Steve, you're more than compensated for it man. Walk into nearly any Java shop and say "I'm Steve Loughran and I wrote Java Development with Ant and am one of the top committers on Ant" and unless they're doing something really special I bet you'll get the job unless you have really terrible interviewing skills. Also you could do the talk circuit if you wanted to and pull in at least enough to eat off of (but not necessarily pay rent). Joe Schmoe developer can't pull that off. Many Apache committers do have salary (though many do not). While I think Marc's views are a bit extreme, I think you underestimate your compensation or at least your potential for compensation. No one is completely altruistic here and many of the compensations that we receive do have monitary value regardless of whether it is taxable :-)
In fact, the vast majority of the software tools I use have no centralized comercial backing. I prefer to use PostgreSQL over MySQL because it is a better RDBMS, for example.
Have you looked at the Firebird RDBMS ? if so what do you think of it?
FalconShould there be a Law?
He's not completely wrong. Open source people will only work on what interests them so you have a ton of very crappy, partially-finished open source software out there that usually just barely scratches the itch of the original programmer. Sure there are successes like Mozilla Firefox, Apache, KDE, Gnome, the Linux kernel, etc., but for every success there are hundreds of completely useless failures out there.
While partially true I wouldn't necessarily say they were "useless failures". What I would say is that some of these are of such a narrow interest that only a small number of people would even make use of them if they knew but because they are such not many would know of them.
FalconShould there be a Law?
If you pay someone to modify some GPL'ed code that you find useful AND use for free AND want to sell it, provide your modified source code.
While I have an issue with what he said, it's not this, he didn't say anything about the GPL or software written under the GPL, at least not in this post you replied to.
FalconShould there be a Law?
As long as the person learns something I don't think it's necessarily a failure. Though I don't know the stats I'd say most people "fail" before they ever become successful, they become successful because they learn as they fail.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Ok, Thanks. I've installed it for personal use but haven't actually used, or learned to use, it yet.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Communism really must be considered against the time in which it was born; it is an extreme ideology, which was inspired by the worst excesses of capitalism
While communism is extreme it wasn't inspired by capitalism based on a free market. Unfortunately there hasn't been a capitalist system in quite some tyme. The Corporate Aristocracy murdered it.
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
FalconThomas Jefferson, 1814
Should there be a Law?
I somehow got the impression that the submitter has spent a whole bunch of time on slashdot, but not much at all outside of his parent's basement.
I've actually been living out on my own for about 20 years now, and I own a web development business. I know the number of people making money by writing Open Source software is rather small.
My question seems to have raised a lot of hackles, because the repsonses haven't been at all uniform. Without the idealists who created Free Software and the Open Source movement, there would be no JBoss, no Red Hat, et. al. The flip side is that without the hard-nosed businessmen who saw innovative ways of structuring their businesses around Open Source, the adoption of Open Source software may have permanently stalled.
I've read plenty about how the "suits" don't understand the motivation of programmers who develop Open Source tools. I was simply surprised to see Fleury take the flip side of the coin and seemingly distill the entire Open Source movement down to the profit motive, then dismiss those who don't embrace his particular ethos and business tactics as chumps.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I regularly get pulled in to help w/ projects that are in trouble @work. And I go up to them and say 'where are your unit tests'. And they say 'what tests?', or 'yeah, we read that bit but didnt have time'. And I say 'you're late now, arent you?'
I actually despair at how there are many projects that do have my book, but completely fail to grasp the idea of testing. And that saddens me. Because the main reward for having a book is not the sales figures, it is the belief that you are benefiting the world by passing on your knowledge. And if they skimp on JUnit, well, the rest is irrelevant.
Summary: available free of charge for academic or internal business use.
For its time, this was a relatively permissive license, but does not qualify it as open source.
Asshole Open Source, with funny illustration.
What was the first tool for real time chat? IRC or AIM? Who developed it?
Neither. Unix "talk" was long before IRC and, of course, AIM.
Take a look at IBM. They're moving to a services-based model.
Do you really want a world where software is maintained by IBM Global Services (and managed by former members of PriceWaterhouse Coopers)?
Services and consulting gigs are big bucks today, and getting bigger. Millions of dollars, usually. High hourly rates. And busloads of consultants of varying quality.
The services-based model isn't all it's cracked up to be, and I'm not sure it's the most appropriate way to ensure "freedom of code".
-Stu
"I've got 2 words for you: SHUT THE FUCK UP!"
:^)
Anger is fun!
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
...but isn't it in some sense built on the shoulders of the hippies and hobbyists he seems to scorn?"
Of course it is. And like any good capitalist, he will exploit it for all its worth. All the while thinking, "What a bunch of suckers".
FTA:
If I'm going to pass on seeing my girlfriend or my kids...
So, he's a two timin' bastard, besides. Probably OJ'd his wife...
That's a pretty pessimistic view. You expect to change the world with one book? I see an opportunity. I share your discomfort with the poor grade of software development and the love of unit tests (you need only look at one of my projects and see the healthy set of code). You're going to have to work harder than just writing a book. You're going to have to evangelize and preach the good word! The good news is that it can be quite lucrative if you can build a reputation around it.
;-)
However, I think there is a basic problem that spans both IT management and development. On one hand management is still being trained in the economics of a manufacture economy. (Labor vs Capital and the false idea that each worker is an equivilent unit). They make decisions that way. They make priorities that way. Then due to the risky proposition partially due to the high cost and high failure rate, large bureaucracies form around software development organizations.
On the other side, you have software developers who are not trained in the basic skills such as revision control. Developers who don't understand threading, concurrency, collection performance, etc. So what is the management solution (labor vs capital)? Offshore and hire MORE cheaper developers. Guess what? Doesn't work.
Hire a team of some of the best developers you can afford and form a mentorship culture with some of the more junior. Understand the skill profile of the individual developer. Hire as FEW developers as you can get away with, looking always for ways to work more efficiently and create higher quality software (load tests are key too) because the maintenance of existing software (statistically 80% of any developer's day) will always be your highest and yet most invisible cost. However, we hide these costs under the rug instead and mire in "project based" management and other nonsense.
I'm not saying its all management's fault. the boom produced a new breed of developer who don't love technology and just went there because the money was there. They don't live and brethe this stuff like we do. They cost less than us (and this isn't a India thing at all, there are GREAT developers in india -- they just don't work for traditional "offshoring" firms with a very bizzare SD mentality) and they don't work as hard to be lazy (meaning stone knives and bearskins vs automation, unit testing and automated load testing).
Anyhow its going to take more than a book and ant to pull that off Steve. For a good model, look at my friend Andy Hunt (http://pragmaticprogrammer.com./ He has made a living off of teaching better software ethos and has learned to brand himself appropriately. To pull this stuff off we geeks have to learn some business stuff and learn to communicate it better. Then don't work at the places who refuse to listen, "change your team or change your team" as they'll sink the unsinkable anyhow.
-Andy
Marc responded: http://jboss.org/jbossBlog/blog/mfleury/2005/07/11 /From_Volunteer_Open_Source_to_Professional_Open_S ource.txt
It's drawback ... ) indicates a pause or more typically an intentional ommission.
Innovate
Imitate
Imitating
People
Sense
And by the way the ellipsis (
Were you going for some kind of Shakespearian drama here?
Anyone who whines about being modded down should be.