Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!)
load "$",8,1
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"
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