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Sun Says, "Compensate OSS Developers"
krelian writes "Talking at Netbeans Day, Rich Green, Sun executive vice president for software, expressed doubts about the current open source model in which developers create free intellectual property only to have others scoop it up and generate huge amounts of revenue. Green said, 'I think in the long term that this is a worrisome scenario [and] not sustainable. We are looking very closely at compensating people for the work that they do.'" Green didn't provide any details about how payments from Sun or others might work.
I thought the whole point of Open Source was doing good for mankind in general, not categorically for the investors...
I, for one, am looking forward to the inevitable
Maybe Sun could set an example by forking over a few bucks for the free software they "steal" from all over.
From the FTA
Meanwhile, author Tim O'Reilly said at CommunityOne that the days in which developer salaries differ based on the nation where the developer is located were numbered. Developers overseas now are asking why they should get paid less than others, he said. "We're actually coming to the end of cheap outsourcing," O'Reilly said.
When these numbered days are over, a great wave of levelling will start if our friend TOR is proved correct.
As all B5 fans know, truth is a tripple edged sword. Sun has right, but to a very limited extent. Let's think about it this way [what's coming is a somewhat pessimistic speculation, take it as such]. There are ten thousand people who contribute to a huge FOSS project. Then comes a company and says, hey people, you did a great job, we'll compensate you, and they pick some of these people based on some rules and give them something for their work. What will the others think, what will happen to them ? Will they think hey, we worked and they think our work isn't worth a dime ? So what will they do, stop contributing ? If so, who'll continue the work ? Those who've been "compensated", which pack would probably become smaller and smaller, in the end landing the whole development in the hands of the "compensators".
:))
Offer prizes for some goals, make donations for larger and/or more important projects, or to people whose work is sympathetic to you, but when you start differentiating smaller groups of people based on blurry criteria I don't think you're working towards helping FOSS as a whole.
There is a need to work closely with those in the open-source community to share revenues, said Green. - share theirs or share yours ?
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Let those corporations take the software. When there are problems, they still have to come back to us. Then we start charging them real money. If they improve it by hiring their own engineers, the project wins. If we get employed/contracted, the project wins too.
McNealy used to say plenty of stupid shit too. Just because some high level executive expresses his personal opinion, it does not mean that he is talking for the company.
If the Open Source Market Development Manager for Sun had said something like this, then we'd have something to talk about.
Instead, people make want to make out that companies are individuals with single opinions.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's been sustaining itself for decades now. The popular software tends to create communities with services. The unpopular software can usually be maintained in the developers spare time.
Then there's OpenOffice.org, which isn't fun to hack on (the build environment is horrible), is slow, lacks plugins and extensions, and with uninspired planet blogs quite unlike anyone else.
The problem though is that Office software is necessary (other OSS Office packages are years away from competing features) for the desktop and OOo is good enough to quell developers but not good enough for anyone to be particularly happy about. No wonder Sun have problems getting contributions.
There is a schtick within OSS that you shouldn't ask for money... are there any other ways of earning money from happy users other than a paypal button?
One word: Hookers. Lots of'em!
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
i remember debian compensated some people to get 4.0 out quickly... this complicated things; some unpaid contributers to the debian project protested by working very slow. the compensation policy had the opposite effect of what was intended.
i also think that a large part of the reason for FLOSS to be of high(er) quality (than proprietary software) is that it is written from for fun and from passion. people dont like to produce low quality stuff for fun and from passion. nope, that kind of stuff is produced for money, e.g. compensations!
so: sun, please dont pay us, but make some anonymous donations to some projects without letting know why you did it. this will keep us healthy.
But it's pretty strange to claim that something which seems to have worked just fine for the last 15 years is "not sustainable", without providing any argument whatsoever as to what, exactly, prevents the next 5 years for working for the same reason that the last 5 has.
maybe the open source community is slowly starting to evolve.... maybe someday they'll reach their darwinist epoch: a capitalist.
hey geeks, you see those things on cars? theyre called wheels. take a hint.
Have they pumped any money in that open source project called openssh? It appears to me that the OpenBSD team has created "free intellectual property only to have others, Sun included, scoop it up and generate huge amounts of revenue". Sponsoring openssh is a good test to see if they really mean it or are talking rubbish.
We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us
While I'm sure there's a deeper motive here, it is true that most of the best developers of OSS don't exactly have full work weeks to dedicate to projects that they aren't being compensated for. People have to eat, after all, and when you've got a family to support you can't really afford to spend 50+ hours a week on an open source project.
Of course, there is already a solution -- companies should start hiring developers to work on OSS. This already happens, and it works out pretty well for the most part. Sure, you might wind up with a little more corporate bias on your development roadmap, but in exchange you get a lot of financial and manpower support.
"As all B5 fans know, "
Yes
"in which developers create free intellectual property only to have others scoop it up and generate huge amounts of revenue."
It seems SUN wants to 'protect' OSS devls against themselves. I, however, am quite confident that, when OSS developers put their program/code under the GPL (or something) they are aware that others might scoop it up. It's *meant* to be scooped up, after all.
No one (notorious fools exepted) is going to open source a product with the expecation they can prevent others from scooping it up - and when under the GPL, they won't expect to prohibit others from making a buck of it neither. The rules are inherent to the Open Sourcing, after all. If you want to keep it all for yourself, then you choose a proprietary licence.
The notion of Sun that the system will fail because others might use the code is mindboggling stupid and contradicted by all grand OSS projects. If people weren't free to 'scoop up' the code, there wouldn't be an OSS in the first place.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
If there ever was a headline writing itself...
From wikipedia:
e el_Community
"The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was founded in 1951 (Treaty of Paris), by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to pool the steel and coal resources of its member-states."
"The ECSC served as the foundation for the later development of the European Economic Community (later renamed the European Community by the Maastricht Treaty), and then the European Union."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Coal_and_St
What's next, modding the parent insightful?
I don't even know what 'intellectual property' is. As a software developer I author programs for computers and documentation, both of which are protected by copyright law.
I tried for years to get someone in the movie industry interested in (now called a 'wiki') a group screenplay writing software project... but the problem is, in defining a power structure you change it. Finally they are starting to use scheduling and writing tools and movies look good this summer years later!
...before the spirit to "do good to mankind" gives way to capitalism.
To be very frank, no one can earn a living just by "doing good". And if I have a job thats paying me well, I will use all my time and try to excel at my job so I can earn more and provide a good life to my family. So question is why should I do open source development at all??? Whats my incentive here (other than the greater good, which sadly, I cannot see).
Like it or loathe it, that's why the GPL is such a fair license. Developers, whether individuals or large corporations, are compelled to put any code contributions back into the project for the benefit of everyone else. In essence, everyone gets paid in kind by the contribution of code which dramatically increases the quality of the project over time, and the ability to use the software for free.
This means that companies who would never be able to maintain a whole OS by themselves, such as Red Hat and even companies like Novell and IBM now, can use a kernel and an operating system to do what they want on a level playing field which would have cost them billions to develop purely by themselves. Smaller contributors and those not contributing get a kernel and OS they can use for free, and do what they want with, and they make up something called the open source community.
This article should be re-titled "Sun Doesn't Understand the GPL or How Successful Open Source Projects Work". I find that a touch worrying from their perspective. It seems they've been drinking too much of the Intellectual Property anti-freeze.
Does that mean that they are going to honour this request from the NeoOffice people?
Meanwhile...
The only way* for a company to make "huge amounts of revenue" from Open Source software is to add value so that people are prepared to pay you money for something that they could get elsewhere for free. That "value" might be providing top quality support, or it might be investigating in marketing or just having a number of employees who wear suits and use words like "leverage" that give corporate clients a warm fuzzy feeling. Either way, does anybody really have a problem with that?
Any company director who looses sleep about getting all this "money for nothing" simply needs to let their employees use some of their paid time to contribute to writing OSS code or coordinating OSS development.
*(excluding the "extort protection money on the back of questionable IP violation claims" method, of course).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
That seems like one obvious way to compensate them.
Excuse me, but hasn't the open source been around for a bit longer than "current model"?
I would say that it has already proven its sustainability.
Businesspeople use greed to motivate--it works, is easily understood, easily harnessed, and reproducible on demand. Offer money, and people will show up to work. But since that's the only tool they have, it's the only one they trust.
It's also why so many businesspeople are instinctively against OSS. FreeBSD or whatever may be more stable and secure in the server room, but they aren't going to rely on something that is maintained by hippy visionary volunteers, even if what they're offering is more relaible than the product sold by the guy from MS or whoever. I really think that a considerable part of the resistance to OSS, whether it be GNU/Linux or OpenOffice or whatever, is on principle, not merit. Businesspeople don't understand or trust a product whose existence isn't dependent on someone's search for money.
>I thought the whole point of Open Source was doing good for mankind in general, not categorically for
> the investors...
Biggest...lie...ever.
Does anyone actually believe this joke excuse? There is nothing wrong with BEING PAID for your good work. Get it? MONEY is incentive, we live in a CAPITALIST society, not a socialist one.
And to be entirely honest, I bought into the "good of mankind thing" when I was a student and didn't know better. Then I got a paying job and realized I could afford to buy decent clothes and support my family. Imagine that!
I think I am going to cry reading this cheesy statement that serves nothing more but Sun's PR campaign, besides of course insults to OS movement.
OS developers _are_ compensated. Not directly, but in a long-term in a much more effective way for their careers.
Immediate gratification is joy of creation is followed by long term effect of improved programming skills, establishing networking with peers, "header file publicity", fame, all ultimately leading to much better employment than they could have been offered had they had chosen to remain as repressed TPS pushing cubicle slaves.
But I guess some cash flow from Sun won't hurt as well )))
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The parent gets it. The only way a company is going to make huge amounts of money on open source is by offering something extra. Nobody is going to make any money if they just try to sell open source software. In other words, Rich Green's basic premise is wrong. The only way a company can make money on open source is by selling a service.
The magic of the GPL is that a company can't take someone else's work and sell it back to them.
The thing the parent didn't mention is that the developers, because they are intimately familiar with the software, are in a position to offer services themselves. They may not get paid directly but they are in an excellent position to benefit indirectly.
Pay the developer a dollar, make 10 dollars. Hey we paid them something, now we don't feel bad
The GPL is what is fundamentally different.
- In case of art/media, paying the MAFIAA toll is the only legal way to get it legally. If you try to get it with another way. The MAFIAA will come after you and sue to death the whole building where you live (including all less than 2yo toddler or recently deceased elderly neighbours on the list of sued people).
- In case of OSS, there's a license called GPL whose purpose is to enforce that no matter what the company try (and the version 3 is about pluging the hole that the company may have tried), YOU will ALWAYS be granted to do whatever pleases you (get the software, analyse the code, modify the code) as long as you transmit further that freedoms along the chain.
If any company ever tries to refrain you to get the code and do whatever pleases you, and tries to force to go only through their paid route, that company is in violation of the GPL and loses the right to use the GPLed code in their applications.
Some company may try to make you pay for the OSS software, but that will never prevent you to get the stuff from the original programmer who developed it for FREE and, while browsing his site to download the code, stumble upon a "donate" button and decide to give him some money or hardware.
The motivation of that programmer is also different.
Companies' main motivation is to make money no matter what they deliver (even if it's crap like in Microsoft's case)
OSS programmer's motivation is to develop the software in the first place, because they're scratching an itch (ie.: the motivation is that they actually need the software. Building a working app that solves their initial problem is what they hope to obtain).... Yeah, that, and pure boredom as featured recently on
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Without what? Someone paying the developers?
OSS has been coming along fine, and will continue to do so regardless of whether or not we are getting paid to create it.
Sounds like this guy can't comprehend why anyone would give something away free.
I see your license and raise you a crap !! Muhhhahahahwwhwhhahahah !!!
If I wanted money for my work, I'd find a (real) job instead of getting boreder and boreder !!!!
Besides, it's not my business what any company does with the stuff I put out. If some joe-schmoe company can sell hardware using my software, more power to it !!!!
Worrisome? To whom, Sun?
Not sustainable? I don't see why not, and Green gives zero reasons why it wouldn't be... he just gives a general robin hood analogy and hopes that gives Sun some "thoughtful guy" PR.
Open source dev has been going on officially since the early eighties (Stallman), and Linux itself for fifteen years now with no sign of slowing down, not to mention the ballooning collection of OSS apps.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Open source is good for mankind, in general, but that doesn't mean that developers should not be payed for their work.
Developers should be well payed for their work and the resulting code should be released as open source. To make this happen,
developers should be hired by a company or the community.
That some business models are not compatible with open source is besides the point.
A typical capitalist business model, when applied to software (or, in general, information), does not make sense. These models assume copying is as expensive as creating a new product. For software this is not true, copying software is cheap. It's illegal, in case of non-open source software, but that is an artificial limitation that is ultimately impossible to maintain.
Eventually, for software and other types of copyable artifacts, capitalist business models will disappear. And with them unfair intellectual property laws.
assignment != equality != identity
Java, OpenOffice.org, and OpenSolaris are all mainly created by Sun employees.
Actually, Linux, Firefox, Apache, SAMBA, MySQL, GCC, and the other high profile free software projects are mainly developed by people who get their salary for doing exactly that.
It works the other way as well, half the developers surveyed by the EU FLOSS project state that they do their free software work as part of their job (some indirectly, they contribute to projects they use in their work). The other half consist of equal amounts of students and hobbyists.
The myth that free software is created by unpaid volunteers is hard to kill, despite having little basis in reality. The free software people actually use tends to be created by paid professionals.
doesn't sourceforge already have a donations page that developers can fill in to take donations from anyone?
Leaving aside the question of whether anyone should do this at all, I'm going to discuss how it should be done, if anyone were to do it.
Firstly, grants should be provided on a programmer-by-programmer basis, not a project-by-project basis. This addresses some of the issues that came up with payed Debian developers.
The patrons should establish a committee, which should evaluate the applications of individual programmers, and provide grants (similar to those already given to artists) so that those people can contribute to open source projects full time; whatever projects they wish. Once you have a grant, you need to demonstrate productivity periodically to keep it.
If we are interested in benefiting society as a whole, the applications should form a single pool, and the best developers should get money regardless of what they've been working on.
That's unfortunately unlikely - the patrons of this thing (let's be honest, presumably corporate america) care a *lot* about what people do and do not work on. So, they're going to want to provide grants for developers working in specific areas. Invariably, and as with the NIH which works the same way, this will mean that some second-rate developers get money and some competent developers do not, because the second-rate developers go to a funding section which has more money. Based on the experience of the NIH, this is not even a good way to effect your research goals - but it's just about the only form of control the patrons could exert, however ineffective it would be, so they wouldn't give it up.
Finally, at a certain point you should tenure people - it can take ten years, that's fine. Firstly, job security is a great motivator, even if it takes a while - you'll get a lot more people applying for these grants if they eventually mature into a retirement package. Secondly, someone who's been working on OSS for long enough to get a grant (probably several years at least) and then kept it for a decade, probably contributes more mentoring and otherwise guiding the entire endeavor than they do writing drivers.
I should say, I don't find this to be an odd proposition at all. Historically, the arts and sciences have flourished as a result of patronage - shouldn't be any different today.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
This has got to be one of the silliest things I've read about in a long time. We've got everything from GNU (started 1983) to Beryl (forked from Compiz in Sept. 2006), and somebody is wondering whether this model of development is sustainable? It's been 23 years, isn't that long enough to show that a lot of people are serious about this? This reminds me of the guy recently wondering whether open source had "jumped the shark" just because some big businesses were using it to promote other products. F/OSS software will continue or won't continue to be developed regardless of what businesses do with it, and with many developers donating their time and effort
1. BSD explicitly allows the wholesale appropriation of IP.
2. GPL explicitly disallows it.
Any questions?
you had me at #!
Someone was talking about double edged swords before; payment is also a double edged sword. You can buy lots of beer with your earnings which is good, but you are also going to become responsible for support and timely releases / bugfixes. There can be no more "If you want it fixed so quick then code it yourself" responses. This brings an element of pressure to the equation that many OSS developers seek to avoid, their path may well become dictated by the market with all the deadlines and politics that come with it.
I develop mediumn scale web apps and I the one thing that I have noticed is that my open source products, while taking much longer to devleop / update are in the end far more stable and optimumn than the custom programming jobs with deadlines that I have taken on.
With my OSS releases I have all the time in the world to fiddle and tweak with out the pressure of having to have it finished yesterday...
They may be idiots (though I don't think so), but you're a troll.
Wanting to be equal does not mean you are equal. I'm pretty sure that there are Debian devs who are 10x as productive as the other devs and if the lesser devs have self esteem issues with that well too goddamn bad. They can go and get bent.
Lets take the Linux kernel for example. If you were to start paying those devs I would pick out say maybe the top 15, Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox...etc and pay them handsomely and the rest get bupkis. Writing a driver here or there really isn't worth compensation in my book.
Besides, if anyone bitches you can just throw open source back in their face and say "This IS the way you wanted it isn't it? I mean you COULD have gone to work for a proprietary software company but you CHOSE to code for free instead. So what exactly is your problem with this, genius?"
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Compensation is already available for some OSS developer/contributors.
...the days in which developer salaries differ based on the nation where the developer is located were numbered. Developers overseas now are asking why they should get paid less than others, he said. "We're actually coming to the end of cheap outsourcing."
I found Tim O'Reilly observations more intriguing.
Imagine following the sun, snow or moving to some place with a low cost of living and living like a prince.
> developers create free intellectual property only to have others
> scoop it up and generate huge amounts of revenue
Anybody care to give an example of this happening? I am not aware of any free software that was "scooped up" and is now generating "huge amounts of revenue".
Wake me when this schmuck actually does something more than flap his lips. He has absolutely no idea about the underpinnings FOSS, instead it's "OMG! (some other) company might be able to leverage the largess of these developers and maybe even make a couple bucks". YAIATH (Yet another idiot at the helm).
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
How is this flamebait?
;-) Still, it isn't flamebait by a long shot.
I'm saying that developers who put their code out there under the GPL (or other OSS licence) are fully aware of what that means, and that those licences are meant for the code to be 'scooped up', and yes, often that other parties can make money of their code. They don't need Sun to protect themselves from themselves.
Nobody minds that Sun wants to pay OSS-devs, and certainly not the devs themselves, but the implication of Sun that the OSS concept will falter and grind to a halt if they don't 'subsidise' it, constitutes ignorance and egoflattery at best.
What, exactly, was flamebait about that? I guess some people only read the title of a post and have knee-jerk reactions. That would normally be considered a surprising attitude, but not to me anymore; I'm not new here.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
Sun's model for Java has been to get experts and open source developers work for them for free and then to commercialize it. At the heart has been Sun's misguided JCP. Now, they are compounding the problem with their dual-licensing scheme, which imposes a GPL license on the rest of the world, while Sun reserves a commercial license to themselves and requiring developers to sign over rights to them. Let's not even get into how Sun attempted to rebrand Gnome as the "Java desktop".
Sun is a prime example for taking unfair advantage of open source developers. The solution is for companies like Sun to stop playing games with open source license. If Sun releases Java under a single open source license, then there is no problem and nobody is taken advantage of.
So, here is my challenge to Sun: either stop releasing software under an open source license altogether, or release under a single, open source license that doesn't give Sun any special rights.
The problem with open source development is that to build large projects in timely fashion (i.e. in less than 10 years) simply require more resources than can be realistically put together by a group of volunteers. It requires a team of people working full time. Traditionally, building these sorts of large-scale applications happens either by:
a) Someone with a lot of money and a specific need hires some contractors to build a custom system
b) Someone with a big idea is able to raise capital based on their ability to use copyright and patents to suppress competition
Case (a) is generally compatible with open source, because someone has already decided to put up the money to do the development. However, since you're developing a product to address a fairly narrow need, it's harder to justify (to management to pay for) working on the "big ideas" that solve a broad class of problems.
Case (b) is where interesting, innovative research & development happens, since developers are set out to solve some interesting problem that is broadly applicable to a lot of users (and therefor potential customers). However, such development often requires months or years of development to get off the ground, or to turn prototypes into polished products. Investors typically arn't interested in supporting this development without corresponding customer lock-in which they perceive will allow them to extract the maximum profits from the product.
A large part of the reason for the original article (that certain companies tend to reap the profits of other people's open source sweat work) is that the authors of such products haven't set up companies themselves to provide the services that other people are profiting from. The problem is, nobody is interested in supporting open source until it's already done and ready to use, hence other companies take the cream of the crop while leaving all the risk to individual developers.
What we need are "open source incubators" that provide the support network (both personal and financial) to help get such open soucre development off the ground.
I'll end this with a mention that my own open source project, http://interreality.org/ is looking for this type of support and/or investment to make the jump from prototype to polished product. We are working to build a general purpose platform for online 3D virtual worlds (think Second Life, but with none of the nasty scalability problems, architechtural limitations, or stupid "virtual land economy"). We are presently in the trap I describe here: we're trying to build an extremely complex product that at the pace of volunteer labor will take years and years to complete. If we could fund a couple of people to work on it full time for a year, we could make massive progress and hopefully come out with a product that would be the premire open source platform for online 3D virtual spaces. We're looking for advice and leads on how to make this work. If this sounds interesting to you, feel free to email me tetron@interreality.org.
Basically, don't pay anybody until they make a piece of code that you find useful. You of course have to tell them exactly what you want first, and whoever churns up code for it first or anyone who commits a useful piece gets a cash reward for their part based on the sum total work.
This means the project lead who doesn't do anything but upload files and prepare releases doesn't get much, while the dev who submits the most patches gets the most money. Doc writers and others could still be compensated (we can never get enough good open source doc writers) but based on how important that is to the project the company wanted in the first place.
I think some organization should be saddled with keeping track of all this and funds could be divvied by them without bias to a technology or company. That way Intel doesn't shaft devs who work exclusively on AMD technology and Oracle doesn't impose their will on people who also commit to MySQL. (Not that you can really hack on Oracle but you can do a side-project for them)
All the work should be under the GPL, of course, or a similar license which permits the use AND modification of this code by the good and honest people of the Open Source community.
Psychology is a constantly changing field, but there have been some very good studies that suggest that being rewarded for an action can reduce intrinsic motivation to perform it. The GNU project has a short but good page on this, as it relates to open source. There's also an old (but good) article introducing this effect here.
This, of course, could be found out to be wrong, but it seems like a very dangerous thing if it is right, and it might partially explain why people who are paid to program often no longer want to do it as a hobby - even if what they are paid to do is boring and radically different from what their hobby programming might be.
--- To each of us a Truth is given.
Tod,
....
... everyone acts like they know, using college degree titles as proof of implicit and explicit knowledge, but they are all just giving their best guesses on the basis of dogma and/or explicit knowledge of prior events ... then; as in art, ... post creative-act any positive or negative results/reception is designated as proof of genius or failure.
... allows preferred (no proof) results/interpretations to be perpetuated until clearly proved wrong by a major collapse/failure/rejection.
... Yep, I could continue for many days, but I hope you understand the purpose of my analogy by now, creationism-economics/religion/politics/dogmatism are of the same "mater-of-fact" MP-art justification material for fearful dogmatic faithful, but not many/any others.
... old news/dogma what has laissez-faire economics done for US/EU lately (nothing), other then be spun-&-spiced with some Keynesian Militarism, Nazi (New World Order), Trickle-down and Pay-Up welfare to serve plutocrat and corporatist interest .... EU, US, and others (the citizens) are again the feudal chattel of our society the sheep for fleecing and slaughter.
Economics by dogmatics is like mass-production (MP) fine-art (not advert-art) forgery, it sales for a hell of a lot less every time MP-art is done, it does not hang in a museum, and MP-art ain't a big collectors' item. Why do I use "Art" for my analogy, because economics is like diplomacy, politics, tactics, strategy, religion/mythology, marketing, management
(1) There is math/statistics used, but no real/valid science (Hypothesis, Tests, Data, Theory, Experiment, Results, Logic, Proof/Facts) involved.
(2) Economics is like diplomacy, politics
(3) Economics like diplomacy, politics, history, news, MP-art
(4) Economics and art allows any mix/match of medium/concept/idea... to be used for expressing any complex reality, and if it is bought...purchased then it is a money-maker-keeper.
(5)
Milton Friedman, Born: 1912, Died 2006, Nobel for Economics
One glaring example of Milton Friedman laissez-faire economic failures, is the US and EU China policy. Introducing laissez-faire economics into countries governed by totalitarian regimes will eventually cause political freedom to flourish in the totalitarian regimes, this is Milton Friedman style foreign policy. Economic dogma as diplomacy is "stupid as, as stupid does". China policy: RTFM/B "Milton Friedman laissez-faire economics" for military Sun Tzu value, and use the dogmatist economics weapon against the pseudo-capitalist (US and EU) enemies. IOW: China is well positioned for maintaining a totalitarian regime, wining an asymmetrical economic war, and building the largest modern unconventional and conventional military in the world. At this point we should consider ancient history China culture and the foreign-policy of the first emperor of China.
!HAVEFUN!
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
How about creating a developers community based on an entity that uses open source software for profit, and than splits these profits with developers, proportionaly to their ratings, achieved by the voting of members evaluating things like ammount contributed and importance/quality of the work.
After all, as everyone knows, the archetypal Linux developer is a rabid anarcho-communist; usually modelled after the prototype, Richard Stallman.
You also cannot, without deservedly being labelled a hypocrite, have it both ways. I'm aware that BS rationalisations have existed historically for Commies having/making money such as "we're using the system in order to bring about its' downfall," but let us - for once - be honest here. The topic of making money with Linux has always been governed by the old Stalinist adage that all are equal, but some are more equal than others. Hence the justification behind it being perfectly acceptable for the FSF to accept donations, while at the same time Stallman condemns programmers practicing their art for money. We also have a scenario where putting a copy of Linux on a CD and attaching a price to it is seen as the most heinous, unspeakable form of evil imaginable, and yet every one of the development hosting sites in existence have mechanisms that allow their hosted projects to electronically beg for alms.
If anyone who's ever read anything I've written here has wondered why I think Stallman and his philosophy are both such a virulently toxic memetic disease, the above cognitive dissonance should hopefully provide a potent example. Such thinking originated with him, and is propogated by him and his followers.
Here's an idea that, unlike the usual Commie rhetoric attached to this subject, is genuinely revolutionary:- What about getting rid of the taboo on making money with Linux? The fact that there is so much stigma attached to it tells me that most of the people who propogate this geas aren't actually programmers themselves...because if they were, I'm assuming they wouldn't want there to be a social rule against them doing something they needed to be able to do in order to eat.
These are good examples of where this works. All of those projects are more than high profile - they directly contribute to the ability of companies to make money. The companies who are on the trailing edge of technology can save money by leeching off of free software. However, there aren't a lot of companies with a business plan of "do what everyone else was doing 10 years ago, but do it poorly with untrained staff".
The companies that invest in these projects are doing it to help themselves. They get the features they want implemented when they want and how they want. The more fingers they have in the pie, the more they can drive the future direction of the project. And by sharing something that they're doing for their own use, they get good PR from being a contributing member of the open source community.
I think having people paid to work on these projects by the companies that use them makes perfect sense. The projects that no one cares about don't get paid because they're irrelevant. Likewise, someone who only contributes a little isn't likely to be hired for one of these jobs, and certainly won't keep it long if they just spend their time goofing off.
That was all I needed to read to know that the rest of it was going to be out of touch. The first problem they need to get over is that "intellectual property" is not property, and is anti free market. If you want to give money to OSS developers, then fine, but intellectual "property" has no place in modern societies nor the information age. It's sorta like the guilds of midevil times that claimed things like "the right to make Shoes" was a property right. Sun, are you a guild? Do you want your future to be their future?
The future is information services and not information "properties". The information age is doing to information services what the industrial revolution did to production. My recommendation to Sun is that they had better get with the program or stand the hell out of the way of the freight train that is heading straight toward them. In fact, throwing around phrases like "free intellectual property" might be a bad indication of Suns ability to compete in an undistorted free market. If so, I would be very nervous about placing my bets on Sun Microsystems anytime soon.
The guys over at www.cambrianhouse.com have been banging the get paid for your open source project drum. Of course the project needs to actually make money. But at least it is a venue. Sounds like this thought is in the air.
First of all, I do not know of any open source projects that are free.
Someone, somewhere is paying or compensating the person for the time he spends writing the code.
Even if you are living on welfare, and are writing code your still being compensated obviously by the government because you are making the decision to write the code with your own free time.
Green has the montra of GREED that has twisted logic that works like this:
1) If you walk down the street, and you pick up garbage, your not being compensated by the city and therefore are wronged because all garbage workers get compensation.
2) If you help a little old lady accross the street, you are being wronged because social services pays people to transport the elderly.
3) If you listen to a tune without paying for it, even if it is comming from your roomates CD player, this is a gross carriage of "intellectual property misappropriation" and well, Green just doesn't see how that sort of thing is "sustainable" to the music industry.
I think the problem with Mr. Green's doubts is that he has not made the connection yet that OSS economics operates on self interest principles that make it superior to what he has learned in his MBA class when it comes to building software.
The reason why OSS works, is because the access to the technology:
1) Isn't restricted.
2) Doesn't have restrictions on anything to learn.
3) Contributions are not only welcome, but encouraged, particularly if it is GNU Software.
It has nothing to do with the Ferrari Green thinks he should have for all ideas he thinks of or collects.
That statement he made about sustainability speaks volumes about how little the guy understands open source economics in general.
I think Mr. Green should get out more.
Perhaps a trip to Redhat, spend the day there and ask some questions.
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
Open source exists mainly because a 100 year copyright for software binaries is very limiting for innovation and limiting for users.
...), could use a timed open source license with conditions like:
It is possible that Sun (or Microsoft
- copyright is self limited to 2-5 years.
- copyrighted software either comes with source, or it given to the library of congress (or similar).
- after the limited copyright period, the source is made available under an open-source/creative-commons licence.
It would be nice if copyright law was reformed for software, but until then, open source licences are the work-around.
Back in The Day when a lot of us were contributing to Public Domain (which was the term for a loose, undocumented, unlegalized form of Open Source back then) .. we always heard the whines, "Well, what happens if someone takes this Public Domain code and sells it?"
.. well, we ALL take advantage of that in our own ways.
.. the thieves and cheats are going to take advantage. That's life.
:-) I'll bet there are pieces of that really great code buried even in the Microsoft "compressed file" functions added around WinXP time as I recall.
.. incorporated parts of our code, and probably with not a hint of credit either. (Wouldn't want anyone's lawyers worried, eh?)
.zip archiver (for every kind of system from Commodore C-64's to Crays (really!)); and we all learned a lot. So what if none of us made a bloody penny?
Well, they sell it, that's what happens. If they were clever enough to find a buyer (to pay money for what would otherwise be free), more power to them. Hell, you're so smart, YOU go sell it! Feel free!
Add services, support, a fancy front end, user customization, whatever it takes. It's free, like beer! Do what you want!
Contribute to Public Domain if you want; we all do it for our own reasons (usually to share what we've learned, and to encourage more PD code so we can learn some more). If you're concerned about someone taking advantage of that
That was then. Some great stuff came out, and still does. Public Domain, Open Source, GPL, whatever
One great example, of which I was most proud to be a very small part, was the Info-Zip Project (or Workgroup). Google it; that was a project
And I'm sure lots and lots of commercial archiving programs stol... errr
But we were all in the Info-Zip Project for our own reasons (mostly to share and learn); we produced a great
How about developers that chose to produce Free Software, do so becuase they want there to be more Free Software? Releasing something under the GPL specifically prevents some company from taking it closed and making money off it, becuase anyone can get it for "free", and if they modify it, they have to release their modifications as Free Software as well.
I think most programmers that write Free Software do so becuase the like to. And probably if they have time to write software at all, they are probably already gainfully employed (even possibly at a position in which it is their job to write, debug, or enhance Free SOftware)
I have been write free/open source software for profit. I'm not talking big projects with many developers here - just a small project with me as the sole developer. This is satisfying because I Believe in free software (that's a capital B). But idealism doesn't make this project my priority. The willingness of organizations to pay for deveolpment does.
I already knew that open source projects effetively governed the participation of many people. I have learned that even with one developer, open source is a powerful way of organizating and coordinationg people and organizations.
For a start, I am not alienated from my work. When I do proprietary develpoment I must walk away at the end of the project. My client or employer doesn't want me taking the work with me, and I can't afford to get attached to it. With open source, I can afford to care - and I do, in part because...
The code is the best advertising I can have. Even when a contract is complete, even if bits of the copyright belong to others, the code is still mine - my name is on it, and I have responsibility for it (for if I don't take responsibility, no-one will). I am the worldwide expert on this thing; if anyone wants something done, it makes sense to come to me. That makes me a single point of failure in a sense, but FOSS is not unique this way - proprietary developers are not interchangeable either, though employers may sometimes foolishly treat them that way.
From a larger perspective, there is an underlying logic of cooperation. The first client for this project sponsored its creation, and they were wise and generous enough to allow me to retain copyright and insist on a GPL license (but then that's part of what attracted me in the first place). Now it is in my interest to improve the code, benefiting all users. It is also in the interest of past clients that I get future clients - because then they benefit from any improvements. The code serves as a means to coordinate multiple participants. It's a bit like a market, only coordinated by sharing rather than competition. (This is where the competitive assumptions built into copyright law and existing institutional policies can create real headaches.)
The problem with accepting money from Sun is that, leaving aside their duplicitous licensing practices for the moment, it's far too easy to get caught up in an "offer you can't refuse"-type situation. OSS development is research, and like any research it needs money. But when you take someone's money, even if it's in the form of a donation along the lines of "Hey, OpenSSH kicks ass, here's some cash," it obligates you to them, even if only in the mind of the giver...and we all know what kind of reality-distortion fields corporations are capable of projecting around themselves (strong enough to bend and break laws).
What this means is that there will eventually form a class system in what is intended to be a more-or-less classless social sphere (OSS development). There will, in effect, be two tiers, the funded and the unfunded, and you can guess where most of the talent will go (there will be exceptions of course, but if you can get paid for it, why do it for free?). This will have the secondary effect of transforming funded OSS developers into basically another branch of corporate software development; it makes me think far too much of the human battery pods in the Matrix movies. Anyone who thinks any company or corporation truly cares about anything other than its bottom line is naive.
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
I think most people in the F/OSS community don't see the importance of Sun's actions in the last couple of years regarding the economic viability of F/OSS.
This is a company who opened sourced (or is open sourcing right now) a very large important and complex portfolio of it's software. It is also a company which is considered a major player in its field and a lot for these software products where successfully sold for big bucks in the past.
F/OSS takes a lot of criticism regarding it economic model which most businessmen see as non existent. If Sun can pull it through and improve its financial results after making such a big commitment to F/OSS software, only than will the F/OSS community will have a winner in their hands to show off in front of skeptics. This is not the same as Red Hat who made a business out of F/OSS but a company which is rejecting the old ways of closed source and is taking a big gamble that F/OSS is not only the right thing to do morally, but that it can also become a better business model than closed source software.
Until that wonderful utopian time, I find the idea that my highly skilled and productive work should benefit those who see me as an interchangeable part with someone in a third world nation, and benefit them for "free", no less, to be highly distasteful.
People always say, "But if you work on OSS, you'll be making people happy!"....
In response, I can only quote a wise man:
Homer: Oh! Look at me! I'm making people happy! I'm the magical man from Happy Land, in a gumdrop house on Lollipop Lane!...... Oh, by the way, I was being sarcastic.
Marge: Well, duuhh.
-The Simpsons, "Flaming Moe's"
Although Rich does not appear to get OSS Devs. It seems to me that OSS Developers are compensated in a number of ways for their efforts including recognition, enjoyment, education and even getting paid real cash. OSS developers sometimes get wealthy by targeting a market, creating SW for it and delivering on a solid product. JBoss comes to mind. The business and development models work and have been around longer than Sun. What appears to be hidden in these comments is that the OSS model is unsustainable because the SW Developer is not compensated for *all* uses of his/her SW - even unintended ones. That the developer is not getting all of the potential value from what s/he created. This is fundamentally the trade-off one makes with open source SW. You give up ownership over all potential markets. In trade you get to leverage existing code to build solutions for your target market (be it you, your friends or the Fortune 500) and potentially additional volume for your SW as others extend the use of your SW into new markets. OSS is an especially powerful technique for people marketing a "platform" who desire volume and third party value add (applications, drivers, etc). This is wonderful for consumers of software. It engenders competition and mitigates the possibility of a monopolist owning the market. OSS is not going away.
Where do I record my hours?
The Open Source model only works because the commercial services, hardware, and software industries are generating the revenue to give OSS developers a day job of some kind (whether that day job is developing commercial software or OSS software isn't relevant.) I would wager that the majority of this contribution is via jobs developing commercial or proprietary software.
This extends to college students as well - their contributions aren't free, they are paid for by loans, grants, college savings funds, etc. Honestly, who is going to pay many thousands of dollars, depending on where you go, to get a Computer Science degree and then spend their free time writing OSS software? Meanwhile this mythological individual flips burgers for a day job because we've achieved Stallman's grand vision of Free Software where programmers are a mere commodity and the only thing you can sell is glorified IT administrator services configuring and installing systems.
I would wager that most of us who have contributed to OSS in one way or another have learned, had our education paid for, cut our teeth on, or were in some other way compensated for our efforts by companies developing internal or closed-source systems.
OSS does not (and cannot) exist in a vacuum.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_soup If everybody contributes a bit of the "garnish" (and only one contributes a stone ;-), pretty soon you have some remarkably good soup.
My use of Open Source is that I have a need that is nearly met by an Open Source project. I contribute a couple of lines of code to fix problems I have, standing on the shoulders of the giants who went before. Individually, the contributions may not be significant, but collectively they form a solution that is significant.
There is no way I (or those that pay me, or those that I donate time to support) could afford a fraction of the functionality I get for a couple 10s or 100s of hours of labor I put in. Open Source is not free, but the return on investment for me and my clients is astounding.
Friend of mine and I were talking about the history of copyright which is, really, a modern phenomena. We did, you know, build Western Civilization without it. The concept came along at a late stage. The tide of history may be turning against the concept. It happens. The value of copyright was questioned and debated at the time of the founding of the US. Thomas Jefferson was leery of the whole idea and wanted the Constitution to be far, far more restrictive on the matter than it ended up being (ultimately, he was right, corporations are now abusing copyright and patent to our detriment, Jefferson's ideas should have been incorporated in the Constitution, we'd be in much better shape than we are now).
Along the way, though, came the GPL. Which I, myself, consider brilliant (though I reserve comment on version 3, I haven't read much about it yet but the basic idea is great). The GPL took us a partial step back toward the way we handled things before the monopoly grants we call "copyright" and "patent" (and they are monopoly grants, not "rights").
Consider the pre-copyright era (which was the greater part of our history). The old wandering minstrel had no "copyright" but was given money based on whatever value people assigned to his performance. A really good minstrel gained in reputation and could make more money.
The GPL is somewhat similar in that there are "performances" going on all over the place. Many to suit the "performers" own needs or wants or simply for the fun of it. There's a big exchange going on in which I may do a "performance" of something I need that also happens to suit the needs of others and they can benefit. I benefit from tons of other "performances" going on that just happen to suit my needs.
So far so good.
But I think we're at an early stage of a major component of the pre-copyright era. Patronage.
You can, these days, toss some coins in the "hat" of the "performer" via something like a PayPal donation but I think we could do better. We also have some foundations that allow for patronage by corporations. But what I think we're missing something.
This isn't my idea, it was my friend's. But he passed away not long after Katrina and never got a chance to get this going and see if it would work. I'm going to toss it out and see if maybe it'll get somebody out there thinking as I'm not able to spend the time trying to make it fly.
Patronage used to be done by the very wealthy. They had the money to commission an artist to do a painting or play or opera or whatever. Spend a year or two or not having to do anything but their art. And we still do that to some degree but with the Internet, we could do something I think would be very, very interesting.
Suppose you could sign up as a patron and debit $10 a month out of your checking account. Then you "vote", is it were, on the programmers you think are doing the best work in the community. A kind of ranking system where you're saying "25% should go to X, 10% to Y" and such like.
Suppose you could sign up 50,000 people to do the same. That's $500,000 per *month to be distributed.
Some people may kick in more per month, some may not be able to afford but a few bucks here and there when they get the chance. But the thing about this is that you don't have to have tens of millions of people participating to build up a hell of a "kitty" to disburse.
Since my friend passed away, I don't know where all his research into the matter has gone even though I was the executor of his estate and had to go through all his paperwork. So all I can do at this point is put a bug in some ears. See what happens.
Hell, I'd kick in $10 a month so some of the really good programmers out there could just crank out code all day. Not have to go work for some corporation that would have a marketing department pushing them around. Or just reward somebody who did a really useful widget on the side and released it under the GPL.
I imagine it would have to be some "foundation" or other and legal
Spending money on (Probably more skilled and cheaper) open source development makes most sense for a monopoly, the technology developed will only work inside their framework. However it will also have the problem of creating possible competitors for the monopoly.
The best use would be somewhere like the auto industry which has stagnation in control systems and competes indirectly with other competitors (Ford/Chevy build in the U.S., Kia in Korea etc.) These companies could band together to pay for open source which wouldn't impact their advantage on their own turf but would push development forward, something their stagnant industry needs. I hear about developers working for companies and saying they want the tools they develop for internal use to be open sourced and under their control (GPL can make commercial applications pay) and having conflict with their bosses.
The Open Source model is very diffrent from the closed source model in that developers should be paid for future products not past work, if an open source dev makes an app useful for your company they should be paid to encourage them to develop in that field. If say, the cell phone industry dropped 10,000,000 on Ubuntu with no strings attached the next Ubuntu Mobile edition would get a lot of the "Boring Stuff," that linux devs hate, done and would be a very solid product. It seems obvious it would produce more development for that platform and the donators would have more impact on the types of development taking place. Currently the biggest apps for mobile phones developed through open source are free communication apps which remove the teleco from the picture, something they would love to see be replaced by adding value to the customer and levraging the infrastructure of the telecos.
While I'm sure FOSS developers won't turn down an unexpected paycheck from Sun, in most cases I doubt it would make a difference. The itch would still be there...
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Everyone knows that OSS developers have been the catalyst for today's hi-tech society, but everybody expects that it will always be free, and so are the developers. I'll believe this sudden shift toward commercially supporting OSS when I see it. So far, non-profit organizations, volunteer donations and time are still what makes OSS work. Obviously something more important than money drives these selfless individuals, so making statements about money without a cheque doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. Wake me up when being an OSS developer is actually a viable day job.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
I think the point is that if some corporation is capitalizing on free software and making a profit, it only makes sense for some of that profit to get back to the developers. Even if OSS developers are purely motivated by the itch to develop software, they will be more able to focus on this task if they are not concurrently also focusing on earning money to pay the rent and put food on the table.
You call this a sig?