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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
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.
Come on, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and Java are all Sun projects. Give some credit where it is due.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
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.
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.
Yep, it's not like Sun is the biggest contributor to Open Source in the world.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
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.
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 ]
1. BSD explicitly allows the wholesale appropriation of IP.
2. GPL explicitly disallows it.
Any questions?
you had me at #!
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.
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
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.)