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Is Commercialization Killing Open Source?
An anonymous reader writes "IBM, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat all have a very significant open source element to their businesses. In addition to these juggernauts, there is growing investment in various open source models. Will money flowing into open source destroy its roots? Mark Hinkle just posted an editorial asking the questions Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? in which he comments on 'opensville' and gives some actual investment data, and a lot of insight into the growing trend in 'open source commercialization'. Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"
I'm happy about all the money coming into open source. If it wasn't for Red Hat's persistent support, GNOME would have died due to its awkward choice of technologies - and without that competitive pressure, Qt would probably have stayed closed-source, so KDE would have been dead in my book too. Big money in open source is win-win.
Yeah, the author was pretty unclear on this. Certainly, using the GPL or something similar will prevent companies from legally leaching too much off of the project. At any rate, it insures that any changes the company makes should be able to find their way back to the project itself. Of course, this can still be violated, at which point it becomes a legal question. Honestly, this is one of the big reasons that I disagree with many people who favor BSD style licenses. If that's what you want for your code, then it's all well and good, but don't ever complain about leaching, since the license gives complete permission to go ahead and do that.
Without money flowing in to OSS, fewer people will be able to do useful work.
Sure there is a perception of OSS being written by the selfless hackers giving all their spare time. In reality though, people need to eat, pay the rent and buy computers etc. When organisations fund OSS development they help make it real. OSS businesses have found various ways to make money and do so in various ways.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I'm not sure that analogy is applicable. As pointed out in "C&B," the "commons" problem is that the value of the commons diminishes as more animals grazed there. In software, having other folks use (even if they never return anything) doesn't diminish your value of the software in any fashion.
With commercial software, the value is only in it's artificial scarcity. As AOL has demonstrated, we could blanket the earth in install CD's, so the supply/demand price of the software enclosed approaches zero.
I don't see any problem with it (companies using without returning everything/anything). They'll help fix the common roads when it's in their interest to do so. With more companies using OS software, they'll eventually end up using more of the "common roads" too.
Don't worry, they'll get around to it once all this IP nonsense is settled.
The author laments the fact that there are some enterprises that do not contribute to the community yet draw substantial benefit from that same community. This is the same problem we have with free speech in that many people will benefit from the fact that they can speak, and earn a living from that speach (read: Dvorak) yet only a smaller subset of those speaking are actually saying anything that edifies society or benefits it meaningfully. If the FLOSS community is going to espouse freedom then they'll have to suck it up that the leeches are free to use it.
Disclaimer... I personally can't program worth a crap. I get lost in my own 25 line shell scripts so I have to donate in order to contribute (go elive!)
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I agree with this 100%. If you look at the work that goes into Gnome, a very large proportion of it comes from developers at Redhat and Novell. A lot of the developers are still unaffiliated with any large corporations, but certainly if you browse through the Gnome bugzilla you will see that a lot of the core developers that are pushing Gnome forward are paid for their work. And this really helps the community. Furthermore, Gnome has lately benefited from the interest of late from mobile and embedded developers, who have done a lot of work in push down the resource usage of Gnome components.
Gnome is a big project. There is a lot of code, and a lot of it is showing its age. If Gnome was an all volunteer effort, there would be a lot more focus on exciting new technologies, and less focus on fixing bugs and cleaning up old code. In a sense, this is how I see KDE. KDE is pushed forward by developing new projects and applications, but to a certain degree suffers from the fact that things are constantly being reinvented rather than refined. The hard work that has gone into Gnome by commercialization has helped reduced bugs in the code, kept it up to date, and continues to push the project forward.
#include ".signature"
Things get commercialized. If there's a profit to be made, it'll happen. As long as the licensing stays GPLish I'm totally okay with it.
TFA was weak, I don't think the question of whether a few companies choose to leech off open source projects is really that important to OSS development in the long run.
But in general I think the question of what influence all the money coming into the open source community will have is a good one. If, as is increasingly the case, OSS becomes a key component in the businesses of multi-billion dollar corporations, those corporations will seek to control open source development to protect their investment.
If OSS development becomes increasing corporatized, and the coders and maintainers of large projects are increasingly professionals employed by larger corporations(whether directly or indirectly via donations to a foundation etc) I think this cannot help but have an impact on the character of the open source community.
Personally I cannot picture that an open source movement largely backed and funded by larger corporations would retain any ideals of openness, freedom or even quality software for long. IMNSHO those ideals are antithetical to the corporate live-or-die-by-next-quarters'-results mentality.
I think that the open source community should be wary. Obviously, everything else being equal, more money in open source is a good thing for everybody, more resources and more coders means more great software. But that could well come with a price of it's own, nothing comes free, especially when dealing with corporate America...
Spending money is orthogonal to openness. Mainstream money has simply increased the size of the pie.
As open source becomes more mainstream more mainstream companies more money will get involved. No surprises there.
Niche programmers with free time will continue to scratch their itch. No surprises their either.
The two groups exist together quite happily. Most open source programmers want their work to become more mainstream.
It's only when companies try to do an end-run around open licenses that there's problems and that's exactly the same issue as proprietary software licenses being abused.
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DRM. You don't control it means you don't own it.
One day you'll need to fix something or write a replacement for some piece of software out of sheer annoyance and you'll release the code because that's the sensible thing to do.
;^)
That's our worth, freedom will always be more than a career path
The issue isn't about whether too much money or commercialization is killing open source software (culture/roots/projects). It seems to me that the root cause has to do with the nature of the widely publicized open source projects. As open operating systems (Linux, NetBSD, etc.) and applications (Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) grow in complexity, they outstrip the abilities of ad hoc, grass roots "open source" organizations to develop and maintain them.
Simply put any serious, valuable, widely-used open source project today is very likely a large and complicated one. Open Source has outgrown its own infrastructure and the only one available that can pick up the projects and move them forward are those operated by commercial organizations with the resources to throw at these hard problems.
Shut up and eat your vegetables!!!
I think you have it exactly backwards.
As projects become larger and more complex, they outstrip the ability of anything but a decentralised network of programmers. The resources of a traditional centralised software company, even the biggest in the business, is nothing compared to what decentralised networks of programmers have. The linux kernel team being one excellent example. And commercial software houses - *many* of them - are definitely involved, but the model is still distributed. No single company could handle that task - a widely distributed team from all around the world, with both commercial and noncommercial interests contributing, can and does.
Projects that attempt to decentralise their development while still retaining a monolithic structure internally may find that doesnt work so well, of course. For this to work the project must follow the 'unix way' and have many more-or-less self contained modules that work together, rather than building monolithic do-everthing apps. Not everyone seems to grok that yet, but give it time.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
In all this discussion of Big Business "Open Source" software let's tip our hats to the thousands of Debian Developers who help keep software FREE. Not just free in monetary terms, free of the stranglehold that big business can place on software development when they decide to move on to the next big thing.
What about Gentoo, Fedora, Linux From Scratch, Gobolinux, and Blag? (To name but a few other non-commercial Linux distros) Don't they count too?
Debian is *not* the only non-commercial Linux distribution in existence. Please don't give me the usual crap in response about it being the only "serious" non-commercial distro in existence either, because that's entirely subjective, emotive bullshit too. The other distros I've mentioned are perfectly serious to the people using/developing them.
I'm very tired of Debian advocates' lack of awareness of Debian's alternatives...although actually, I'm really just plain sick of Debian advocates in general.
It's a good point, however there *must* be something specifying how those modules should behave when errors occur, handle input etc or the whole thing reaches the stage Linux has now where it works, and works well for the vast majority of tasks, but only if you remember the right combination of switches to make one module talk nicely to another module provided that you pipe it through a shell script to do something trivial like remove blank lines, because the first app includes them for readability but the developers of the second app decided that they should correspond to an EOF.
The 'unix way' is great, don't get me wrong, but it's now reached the stage where there should be a central body saying "Here are various behaviours, you should use these switches to achieve them. Here is how you should format your output. If this happens, throw this specific error." and so on. People, especially businesses, don't like to have to learn the nuances of every individual app because the developers use -E and not -e.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
I really don't care what people's motives are for developing open source software as long as they get the licenses right. Any of the common open source licenses will do: GPL, BSD, LGPL, Apache, etc.
The only real problem I occasionally see with commercial open source is dual licensed software, which may be nominally under an open source license, but is usually run as a closed source project and often has unexpected hidden costs.