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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.
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.
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.
Exactly. When I read the line 'developers create free intellectual property only to have others scoop it up', I thought, why's Sun getting worried, they're using the GPL after all, not the BSD license. Even if the returns are not monetary, the GPL at least guarantees positive, useful returns that every one can profit from.
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Would you please share your secrets on how you keep yourself fed if not by buying food with money? Now, wouldn't it be grand if you could acquire said money by developing OSS? What the hell is wrong with the idea of making money? I have to write proprietary software for a living because that's where the money is, and I try to find the time to do OSS when I can. The overall amount of OSS produced could me much bigger if more people could do that for a living.
On the other hand, as soon as money is involved, some OSS developers become childish and want it all for themselves. See what Dunc Tank has done to Etch. People who were developing for free before decided it was no longer worth it to do it for free because somebody was being paid.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
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.
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.
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.
I think businesses would love it if it was a service that was free, and if they needed an extra gear they can throw in some cash. Unfortunately, like the Debian incident putting money in doesn't always make it progress faster. Cash is concrete and transferable. You can't give a person who's lost the spark to program a new spark plug. In fact, there's been cases where a company has become heavy users of something and the developers go tired of acting like their support desk. And they don't want to become tech support just because you're willing to pay them. "Hippy visionary volunteers" are a fickle bunch, even if they produce brilliant software. The trouble is that if they aren't looking for what you have to offer, you have no leverage at all. It just becomes some sort of unmanagable software that's going whereever they want to go, and you can either tag along or fall off. You don't know how to prod or poke it make it suit your business needs without breaking it apart. In that sense, I can understand why they don't like it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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