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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?"
Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"
Just like the movie industry, you're pushed to release sequels as frequently as possible even when you really don't have anything new or innovative to release.
God spoke to me.
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.
Just like investment of capital ruined the roots of the automotive industry. However, cars are much cheaper now than they would have been being produced one by one in a garage. The roots of any industry or technique usually suck compared to results after the industry has been fully capitalized. So, yes it will probably ruin the roots, but its a good thing.
Among the many aspects of the Open/Free Source cultures is the essential characteristics of Choice and Free Will.
/. seem to love, beer, either Metaphorically or Analogously, Did the EXPLOSION of Micro-Breweries in the last decade kill off Beer?
As we all on
Or did it offer many people the chance to experiment and introduce new types and varieties of beer to an entirely new audience?
Sure, as the the Giant Commercial Software Shops have participated in the process, they have occasionally Big Footed their way through some issues.
Sure, as they have ponied up large numbers of developers and other resources to promote their vision of Open/Free Source, they have inflected the growth and adoption rates of Linux, et al.
But would anyone seriously suggest, for all the real difficulties this has caused, and will cause in the future, without the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS that the Giants have poured into the world of Free/Open Source, that its adoption, growth and technological improvment would be anywhere near where it is now?????
They Pays Their Monies and They Takes Their Chances.....
I'd say we're all much better off with them, than without them. And those of us who want to work on porting LINUX or Java to our favorite Zilog 80 platform, can spend as much time as we chose to do so. Our own pet projects are, as always, up to to us.
As individual developers and contributors, we are as, "Free to Choose", as we have ever been.
Ten quid, she's so easy to blind. And not a word is spoken...
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"
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.
I hope big business keep pumping money into worthwhile open source projects. I really hope they truly support free software. I'm smart enough to know that at least some of these players are only in it to foister some competition against the Microsoft camp and whether that is good enough for the community remains to be seen.
Moore's law is not a law. Theory, yes; Predictable trend, certainly; Law, no.
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
Open source products are making inroads in most vertical markets, deposing commercial product after commercial product. Their user base is soaring, their legitimacy is solidifying, their media presence is expanding. It's actively difficult to find servers that aren't open source.
Exactly what definition of "killing" are we working by, again?
StoneCypher is Full of BS
For open source to become more popular, money must flow in. The result is that some projects request donations to keep the project alive.
Now, I'll play devil's advocate for a second - would you prefer a version of Firefox that isn't up to modern standards (i.e. bloated, memory leaks, CPU hog, and won't render properly), or would you spend money to make it the best browser (i.e. lightning fast, lightweight, and perfect rendering)? I've considered allowing you to spend time to help the browser, but a project the size of Firefox isn't something that most programmers can jump into.