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There is No Open Source Community
porkrind writes "There is no Open Source Community is an Onlamp article about the economics of open source and how most people get it wrong. Really, open source is much more about supply and demand than it is about an activist community or individual drivers (individuals or individual companies) affecting change on society." From the article: "Taking the position that individuals have pushed open source forward leads to the conclusion that a core group of ideological 'believers' is necessary for the continued success of open source software. Businesses unaware of the falsehood of this claim are too afraid of running afoul of the 'open source community' and sometimes make decisions that are not in their financial interests. Both open source-based and proprietary software vendors need to challenge these assumptions."
Allow me to provide some anecdotal evidence of this fear. I work at Corporation X. I'm assigned to a project that requires me to program quite a bit of Java from scratch. So I download the latest version of Java and try to install it. No dice. I need a system administrator because only the JRE is on there, not the JDK. I e-mail my manager that it's going to be tough
So this FOSS department gives me a business process to follow which contains 31 steps that I have to push paperwork through. I say screw it and attempt to befriend a system administrator. About as far as I got was asking him to put the JDK, Apache Ant and Eclipse on my computer
What were they doing in that time? Highly paid lawyers were sitting around a desk grilling my manager about what this software would be used for. Then they debated whether or not someone could come after Corporation X in the future if they learned that their editor was used to create a project.
My frustrations abound in the corporate world but after what SCO pulled, maybe this insane precaution is necessary?
I can't help but smile at the wad of dough next to this articles on the homepage as whoever made that the icon for this category had no idea how much it applies here.
My work here is dung.
Rule #1 of Open Source Community:
Do not talk about Open Source Community
Rule #2 of Open Source Community:
DO NOT TALK ABOUT OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY!!!
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
"Taking the position that individuals have pushed open source forward leads to the conclusion that a core group of ideological 'believers' is necessary for the continued success of open source software."
There's a Non Sequitur right there in the summary; just because an individual may have pushed open source forward in the past does not imply anything about future need.
Contrast this with saying "an individual pushed the invention of a wheel forward, leading to the conclusion that a core group of ideological 'believers' is necessary for the continued success of the wheel" and you see the flaw in the reasoning.
Tell your friends about xenu.net
Here's an anecdote from Richard Stallman.
At a trade show in late 1998, dedicated to the operating system often referred to as ``Linux'', the featured speaker was an executive from a prominent software company. He was probably invited on account of his company's decision to ``support'' that system. Unfortunately, their form of ``support'' consists of releasing non-free software that works with the system--in other words, using our community as a market but not contributing to it.
He said, ``There is no way we will make our product open source, but perhaps we will make it `internal' open source. If we allow our customer support staff to have access to the source code, they could fix bugs for the customers, and we could provide a better product and better service.'' (This is not an exact quote, as I did not write his words down, but it gets the gist.)
People in the audience afterward told me, ``He just doesn't get the point.'' But is that so? Which point did he not get?
He did not miss the point of the Open Source movement. That movement does not say users should have freedom, only that allowing more people to look at the source code and help improve it makes for faster and better development. The executive grasped that point completely; unwilling to carry out that approach in full, users included, he was considering implementing it partially, within the company.
The point that he missed is the point that ``open source'' was designed not to raise: the point that users deserve freedom.
Spreading the idea of freedom is a big job--it needs your help. That's why we stick to the term ``free software'' in the GNU Project, so we can help do that job. If you feel that freedom and community are important for their own sake--not just for the convenience they bring--please join us in using the term ``free software''.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
with the article.
"Taking the position that individuals have pushed open source forward leads to the conclusion that a core group of ideological 'believers' is necessary for the continued success of open source software."
Take the formation and continuation of the United States.
Certainly it was started by a small group of ideologically and personally "strong" individuals, a core group that got the ball rolling. But today, the country has reached a critical mass that although could be unravelled, seems to be for the most part on autopilot.
This article irritates me in the way that most news media coverage irritates me: they purposefully polarize an issue, then present two exaggerated extremes, and try to figure out which one is correct. In the real world, neither is correct, and the truth is somewhere in between.
This article tries to conclude "there is no open source community." They say: "Some software vendors believe that open source is an ideological movement." but say that this is an "entertaining narrative" and that the conventional wisdom (that ideological people drive open source) is wrong.
Why can the middle ground be true? Ideological believers in open source contribute significantly to open source. They evangelize and often they diretly contribute (with code, for instance!). Will an open source project die if the ideological believers abandon it? Will an open source project die if the community stops caring? The answer is (as always): it depends. Many projects are community-driven, so of course they require the community push. Others are driven more by companies, so as long as there are enough companies involved, the project will persist.
I have not finished reading the article, but already I'm annoyed. I find the black vs. white picture it paints a bit boring. The real world is complicated. It is worth making the point that companies should not fall into naive assumptions about open-source... but then again they would be silly to ignore the history of open-source, and the fact that alot of it really is driven and maintained by the community. Use that community to your advantage (but do not be led to believe that they are the final word in every respect).
So is there an Open-Source Community? Yes, of course.
Either this story is totally fabricated, or the company you work for is staffed by complete morons and will likely go under shortly.
First of all, you don't need a system administrator to install any of those things. Apache, Java, Ant, Eclipse, Tomcat, can all run from your home directory, or anywhere else for that matter. Don't have access to port 80? Run it on some other port for development.
Second of all, Java is not open source in any way, shape, or form.
Third, WTF is your employer doing asking you to write a Java application, but forcing you to jump through hoops to get the software to do it?
Fourth, if this application you are writing is supposed to be deploye don Apache and Tomcat, then obviously the company has already given the go-ahead to use this open source software. So why the hassle?
It sounds like this is either a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, or a case of complete incompetance. Neither of which is good for a company.
During Margaret Thatcher's reign in the UK, she said 'there is no such thing as society'. I find this to be very similar and flawed in the same way. Not everything is supply and demand, tooth and claw. There is room for altruism, generosity and openness too. I find all these in many of my contacts with 'open source' folks. Or maybe I'm just and old hippy, past my sell-by date...
On y va, qui mal y pense!
The article lacks evidence. It spends a great deal of time talking about economics of scale without at any point presenting what specific scale is required for certain effects to occur. Further his timeline is very far off. When open source developed most software were written by a very small number of people living close to one another and then distributed widely by mail. Sure the wide adoption of the internet helped both commercial and open source software use resources geographically far apart but he completely fails to explain why one side benefitted more than the other.
What are the implications for software developers? The obvious manifestation of a lower bar to entry coupled with an increasing number of programmers is that it is getting awfully hard for a developer to charge for software. (Quick, tell me the last time you paid for a bare-bones email client.)
A great example. In 1995 when was the last time people paid for software that had been expensive in 1980? The 1980 office products would be free throw ins by 1995. Small utilities are first sold separately and then get bundled into other larger programs. There proves nothing about scale.
It used to be that a developer could hack up some small utility, pass it around as shareware, and ask nicely for people to send money. While shareware still exists, the trends are not in its favor. More recently, people who hack together a simple utility simply give it away. They don't ask for payment, because they recognize that it's generally a fruitless endeavor. It's not that they give away the software because they think it's a nice thing to do; they give it away because it's the only way anyone will actually notice.
There was never a period of time when shareware was a particularly good model for anything other than marketing. The original shareware authors generally had a plan of:
1) Write shareware
2) Build up a user base (who pretty much don't pay)
3) Use this base to get a commercial vendor interested enough to finance bring the product out commercially
I could go on but this strikes me as a college freshman economics term paper on applying economic ideas to a recent trend, not as a real insight.
> Freedom also means that you don't have to make your software "open source" or "Free" if you don't want to.
You're calling the power to take away other people's freedom, a "freedom" in itself. Rubbish. When liberty in an inalienable right for everybody, yes, the "Freedom" to own slaves will be lost. No tear shed here.
Please help publicise swpat.org - the software patents wiki
Some random thoughts about complexity. I don't have a coherent argument though:
The author seems to assume that the more programmers there are, the more a software project will advance. In my experience, though, a small, dedicated team of 1 to 4 programmers can outperform the entire rest of the world in 99% of interesting cases. On page 3, for example,
The author seems to equate an increase in complexity with an increase in functionality. It's true to some extent, but it also makes maintenance harder. To maintain or even improve any software, you need people who understand that software and, more importantly, who understand each other's changes. Which is why it's so nice to have a small group who can meet and talk and make decisions together. And to be productive, those people have to have a really good reason to:
So far, I have seen these qualities mainly in commercial teams, with a few prominent exceptions in the open-source world.