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How Has Open Source Helped You Commercially?
Slithe asks: "In the past few years, OSS has proven that sharing one's source code can be beneficial to both businesses and their customers. More than a few young programmers are thankful that they were allowed to learn from professional developers by browsing through and hacking on 'enterprise quality' code. My question to developers of commercial OSS is this: Have you, personally, ever benefited from having the source code to your project freely available and dowloadable, instead of being kept under lock-and-key? Have you ever fixed a bug in your spare time? Have you ever sought outside help (providing source code snippets) on a particularly nasty problem?"
No, just kidding, actually it didn't. Sorry to get your hopes "up".
I'm glad I can learn from such quality enterprise code as this:
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/64597/ShowPost.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/64833/ShowPost.aspx
Excerpt for the lazy:
public class SqlWords
{
public const string SELECT = " SELECT ";
public const string TOP = " TOP ";
public const string DISTINCT = " DISTINCT ";
public const string FROM = " FROM ";
public const string INNER = " INNER ";
public const string JOIN = " JOIN ";
public const string INNER_JOIN = " INNER JOIN ";
public const string LEFT = " LEFT ";
}
DYWYPI?
I reckon my billing rate has gone up a couple of bucks for every CPAN module I've released over the years, especially for clients where I turn up and they are already using my code.
:/
Not to mention that by releasing it, I get a whole bunch of people to hammer my code and find bugs, so I don't have to. It's a win-win situation!
Of course, since it's all on public display, uploading crappy badly-rating bug-ridden slop would probably have the opposite effect
Aside from your wholesale copying and posting of the entire article here---a move which undoubtedly oversteps the bounds of fair use---I will merely point you to this article on Groklaw in which I think PJ deftly points out the the errors in the Economist article, thereby leaving me with little else to say but: troll much?
I work for [CENSORED*], and we use the open source app [CENSORED*] by snagging it's source, modifying it a bit, and then deploying it internally, and only internally.(We don't distribute it outside of the company, so there is no one to whom we would have to give out our source to) This allows us to [CENSORED*] the [CENSORED*], and get [CENSORED*] on [CENSORED*]. It's a profitable business, as you can tell.
* These censored bits brought to you by men in black coats, and my NDA. Enjoy!
As an example, take a look at the functions in the standard I/O library for C. The various scanf() and prinf() variations use much the same arguments, but each one has them in a different order. There's no rhyme or reason to it, you either have to memorize the order or look it up. Not so with the functions Dan wrote! Part of his planning for a subroutine/function package was deciding what order the arguments would go in, and they were in exactly that order every time. (Many of the routines used either the same set of arguments, or a subset of them.) I was working with him because he'd gone blind from diabetes, and in all the time we worked on that package, he never got the arguments wrong because he'd planned it out ahead of time. In this case, there were only three functions that the average user'd need, and the rest were helpers for them. Still, if anybody needed them, they were there, and easy to use.
Now, imagine if this code were being used in a current OSS project. (Unlikely; not only is it in FORTRAN, the problem it solved had to do with command lines and batch files, mostly on a VAX.) Not only would it be easy to use, it'd be easy for somebody else to check the calls and make sure everything was in the right order. Sanity checks become quicker and there are less obscure bugs caused by misordered arguments. He also kept his variable delcarations alphabatized, as well as keeping his functions (except main() of course) in alphabetical order. Made it much easier to find the one you wanted, I can assure you.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
My career is almost solely attributable to OSS. Of course, I'd like to think I have some talent helping me, too. :)
I started at Borland, as a Perl jockey, mostly. I got in trouble with customers for not using Delphi to power the Web site. But something about OSS made me feel safe -- I had been very poor before the Borland job, and I didn't like the idea of hanging my career onto products that cost $2000 -- what if I became poor again and couldn't afford the next release? It seemed like a way to lock myself out of my own toolset.
I never became poor again, though. I fell in love with PHP & Linux. I started to specialize in LAMP. For a while I ran some OSS teams at SST, Arzoo, and Actuate. I bought more & more into the idea that there you give away the tools and sell the service. I started doing freelancing. I got a reputation for being the guy who fixes the bugs in apps that have lost their original developers.
I partly got that reputation because I have fixed a lot of other people's products for free. And when I create a Web site (for myself, for profit), I package up my enhancements and release them to the community. In return, I get calls from recruiters, from people who will pay me $50 for a quick product install, and from people who see my work and want to hire me for big projects. Some of my Web sites have donation buttons, and they actually get used (not as much as I'd like, but still :)
Anyway, to conclude, by integrating myself into the community, the community has helped me to stay afloat. I can pay my mortgage, and feed my kids. In return, the free products I use to make my living get free patches from me.
My current big freelance project is building the auction for Napa Valley Vintner's charity auction. It's a Flash interface, which I didn't make, powered by a PHP backend, which is where I come in. I'm doing something worthwhile, and they're giving me fair pay. I may not have 10,000 customers downloading my product for $29.95, but I do have 10,000 friends who send me big jobs. They know that if I have paying jobs during the week, I'm patching their products during the weekend. It's a good way to make a living.
-Tony
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
I use MythTV, the open source Tivo thing. It lets me skip commercials, so I'd say it's helped out, commercially.
Hoo ah. Tough crowd.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
If by "FOSS advocates", you mean "FOSS advocates who still live in Moms basement". The GPL is about freedom, yes, but is not anti money.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I'm going to have to disagree here. FOSS isn't about avoiding profit. Free software merely thinks there are things more important than profit, that need to be ensured first. Namely, the freedom of the user, as defined in the free software definition. If you can do that and make a profit, go for it.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
The best kernel hack I remember doing was back when I used ATI. I had an AGP 8x ATI card, which used the AGP 3.0 protocol (or whatever), which was not supported in Linux 2.4. As such, Nvidia and ATI both have built-in AGP support, although I believe they'll use the kernel support if it's available, and AGP 8x/3.0 is fully supported in Linux 2.6.
Well, ATI has just as much glue code as Nvidia to tie the binary module to various kernels, and much of the glue code is open. AGP tends to open more of their drivers than Nvidia, including the AGP detection -- maybe the full support, I'm not sure. At any rate, it was broken -- it kept refusing to detect my card as AGP 3.0, and my video card would not work in 2x/4x mode.
So, I found the detection code, commented it out, and hardcoded it as AGP 3.0. I didn't have the knowledge to do it right -- give an option (compile-time, module load time, kernel commandline) to force a particular mode, or figure out why it got the wrong mode in the first place. This hack would obviously break the module on anything but an AGP 3.0 system. But, it worked for me.
I would not have been able to play games on my Linux without this hack. The hack involved would probably never be supplied by a proprietary vendor, and would take a bit more work to make it acceptible for open source -- or for other developers to even notice the problem. But I was able to make it work, for myself, on my own system, and I could not have done that without source code.
And yes, this was a critical bug. I tried other workarounds; they all failed. I'm sure if this bug existed an entirely closed driver, like the one they distribute for Windows, I would never have been able to see 3D acceleration on my box.
The counter-argument, of course, is that the Windows driver worked fine, because Windows is more popular, and more popular means hardware manufacturers write drivers for Windows, not the other way around. But every now and then, there's some showstopping bug, and I can either dig through the source and hack it (or fix it legitimately), or I can wait for a fix. On closed-source platforms, I just have to wait for the fix.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The company I work for wouldn't exist without OSS, at least we wouldn't do what we do now. We're doing VoIP products, and without Linux, the GNU tools, OpenSER and Asterisk we wouldn't be able to build those products since we don't have the resources to write stuff like that ourselves. We've patched almost everything to smaller or larger degrees so that the software fits our needs, and I've sent patches that are interesting to a wider audience back to the appropriate projects. We would never have been able to do the stuff we do with closed source software as we then wouldn't have been able to adapt them to our needs.
And yes, I've also written patches/worked on OSS projects in my spare time. I'm an OSS developer for several years now and also learned a great deal how to code (and how NOT to code) from several open source projects. On a related side note: if you'd like to see how to manage a project (OSS or not) and how to write high quality software, I really recommend looking at SubVersion.
I'm no longer a professional geek. These days I run the night shift at a bar in central Montana.
Amusingly, though, Linux has appeared and helped my bar in the form of a digital jukebox that runs a Linux-based front end.
This thing brings in more cash in a night than our old mechanical CD jukebox did in a week.
The downside is that our net connection seems to die every Monday morning, so I have to show up to deal with that (being "the computer guy").
-l