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Sun Offers Reward Program to Boost Open Source Effort
e5rebel writes to tell us that Sun Microsystems has announced they they will be creating a reward program in order to compensate open source programmers for their work in a hope to boost open source efforts. The program will involve communities like OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC, NetBeans, and OpenOffice.org according to Simon Phipps, Sun's open source officer. "Phipps' post comes some months after Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software, voiced skepticism over the open-source status quo, where developers who contribute to various efforts go uncompensated while corporations are enriched. 'It really is a worrisome social artifact,' Green said at the time. '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.'"
Speaking as a prominent open source developer--one who is forced to post AC lest my employer learn of my hobby--I wholeheartedly endorse this product and or service!
Thank you, but please don't poison what is being done by good will with your money.
How does this increase Sun's revenues? Insanity.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Hopefully this will spark a new interest for contributing to OSS projects. I hope to see other open source projects adopt this idea as well. There's good reasons to contribute now of course; however cash is much more of an incentive for most people than just the respect of some fellow OSS devs.
On reading the article the main thing that jumped out at me was the assumption that Sun, or at least Simon Phipps, believes that most open source programming will be done in India.
Why would we outsource open source software? Is there really that little interest in FOSS in the US, EU, etc.?
Never let reality temper imagination
Never let reality temper imagination
"Rich Green to give out money to Open Source developers" HA! Nice try Sun, couldn't think of a better fake name to give us? Everyone knows you don't have money.
The majority of contribution to the listed software projects already comes from people who get their salary from Sun.
I guess Sun is trying to find a way where they can pay people to work on their projects without directly being employed by Sun. The advantage for Sun would be that they wouldn't have to fire people or pay health or other benefits, and it might be easier to recruit people. The advantage for the programmers would be flexibility in how many hour they want to put into a particular project. And, if Sun doesn't prevent it, that they might be paid twice for doing the same job. Once by their main employer, who pay them to implement a specific feature they need in a project, and once by Sun for doing the same thing.
It's about time they figured it out. A pat on the back don't feed the kids...
Perverse though it might sound, it's plausible that overall satisfaction & productivity might be lower if some are getting paid compared to when none are.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
....they earn money from conferences and such and then turn that into grants and community hardware. Good times.
And yup, the grant PDF file is missing, I've emailed them about it.
The Army reading list
for the work that they do at a rate way, way below a Western engineer's salary.
On the one hand, it's the right thing to do. On the other, I will be shocked if it is a living wage for a developer living in the EU/US.
I think this is a good idea. Google has done well in becoming a favorite with web developers because it helped them make money off their websites. IBM increased revenues by supporting open source because they can sell their stuff as being oss friendly. People are going to be more likely to make their software sun/solaris/java friendly.
This is a sharp turnaround from when all unix variants competed with each other.
Contrary to popular belief, Unix is user friendly. It just happens to be particular about who it makes friends with.
Can they start on the divers, please?
Mind you, can't see Sun paying for people to write drivers for other people hardware...shame.
I am with Linus on this one. Dont trust companies.
There are a lot of tasks that I'll do for a paying employer, that I dislike enough to avoid when I'm doing development Pro Bono.
An honorarium might make it palatable to do really really boring stuff (;-))
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
I'd guess the economic rewards would be much more attractive to an Indian, than to someone from Western Europe or North America. Most of us are either working for a good salary on free software as part of our full time job, or have another full time job, and are working on free software our spare time for the love of it.
In either case, an economic reward for working on free software won't change much, as we are already fully "compensated", or otherwise economically secure and using free software as a hobby. And the number of young people wanting to become programmers in EU and US is far less than what the industry needs, to this is not going to change.
The rewards system will mostly be interesting for students here.
The educational system in India, however, produce huge amounts of programmers, far more than the domestic market can use use. And since living costs is much lower in India, making a living from the reward system might be quite feasible.
From TFA: "I'm announcing it in India because that's where I expect the greatest open-source community growth to come from in the near future. ... If we can play a part in catalyzing the emergence of India as a key international open source power-house, the effect on the software industry will be huge."
:cry:
Great, now open source software will go downhill due to bad programming and bad UIs
Ruby Central is rewarding people to use Ruby. That's like paying people to drink Heineken instead of Keystone Light.
This is just Sun's latest plot to get people to code in Java. I don't care what kinda airmiles bonus scheme Sun starts wavin' at me, that ain't happenin'.
It's nice they want to give people money but why are they worried about the long term success of free software? GNU was started in 1983 and free software has been around as long as there was software. How much longer term can you get than that? Companies have come and gone in the mean time. Free software will outlive Sun's program and Sun itself because people who need code will always be better off with free software. They can make it do what they need and it costs nothing to share.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
I can't say for sure that there hasn't always some small amount of free software around, but it wasn't common in the early days for the computer industry to provide source code to paying customers and certainly it wasn't provided to anybody who was interested.
I have no doubt that a 1983 level of effort in open source is quite sustainable, the question is whether a level of effort necessary to continue open source's market share is sustainable.
The only way you can fully follow your own agenda is to work by yourself or be dictating leader. Note that the license you use is not an issue. Anyone who has looked at the rules for contributing to an open source project can see that they'll be following somebody else's agenda.
Depending on their pay scale, they will probably initially draw more people into open source development. However, these people are motivated only by the money, which in the end is a very weak form of motivation. Hopefully, some will learn to do it for the more meaningful reasons, but if they don't, you can bet they will drop this like Windows Vista as soon as the money slows down, or they find a job that pays better for their time. Also, they do run some risk of experts who are already working on it becoming motivated only by the money as well. The top architects will surely not be fully compensated for what their work is worth, and when they see the comparison, studies have shown that there is a large likelihood that they too will slow down the pace of their contributions. Sun has to be careful to keep this only a secondary motivation to the more meaningful reasons that open source developers have devoted years to. However, if they are doing it to show their gratitude in some way, it may well be very effective. Per usual, there are more factors to consider than just the most obvious ones for making the decision.
Step #1) Copy (yG or control c)
Step #2) Paste (p or control v)
Step #3) Submit
Step #4) Profit!
I don't think I should have to run a 'quick-launcher' on any system (I use Linux too) to speed up the process of launching an Ooo app. It takes about 30 seconds for an Ooo to load, which is okay but the speed of the programs once they are running is really partially not okay. We all know they are eating up RAM.
I would hope this would help in getting things faster in general. I hate the idea of let's use more resources because their available (Vista). Seems to me that Ooo is just being feature-filled and no one is thinking about the slowness that can add to it.
They are worried about the long term success of open source software that Sun controls, not open source in general.
They're all about Openness
http://directorymanager.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/an-open-letter-to-the-opends-community-and-to-sun-microsystems/
Sun is doing it right in my book. I've been very impressed with their work lately; OpenSolaris, ZFS, Project Blackbox, Java (for awhile). I'm not a fanboy yet, but I have been recommending to all the PHBs in IT that we consider investing more in Sun's products. We're about done buying SPARCs but their other products can really benefit us.
Even though I am a technical support/consulting micro-business (READ: one man), I am incredibly motivated by the nature of open source. I'm motivated enough to make it my #1 priority for my business, to bring it to more and more people.
I'm currently undergoing a major project (for me, anyway) involving LTSP in education, and I would *gladly* give some of my profit back, especially for bug fixing specific issues that I run into, as well as general profit-sharing with the people who work on LTSP. I am making money off of open source, and I feel it only honest and right to share it with those who have worked so hard to make it what it is today.
Sun FTW!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
When I looked, a good amount of people will lower rates for an open source contract (actually put it in the contract). You can get someone local, and eventually give it to everyone.
This is unlikely, near term.
The developer community in India is not that large; computer ownership is 14 per 1000 people, which is barely over 1%, compared to them having ~5.2% of the population with cable television [Source: http://blogs.officialexportguide.com/country/].
Add to this the fact that most of the ownership of these machines is centralized, either in large corporations as business equipment, software shops where the employee only has access to work on what the software shop wants worked on, or cyber cafes, where they are not used for development at all, and you get a picture of a country where the resources to support a self-growing Open Source community really aren't there.
For India itself, given that they have ~ 1.6 million computers, and 42,000,000 Internet users [Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/in.htm], most of these people are using public access facilities, such as cyber cafes.
ASIDE: cyber cafes do not grow up in areas where private computer ownership is prevalent; California, for example, has a total of 11 [Source: http://www.globalcomputing.com/Cafes.html].
So it's unlikely that India will become an Open Source power house any time soon, unless ownership of the means to participate in the community moves into the hands of the individual contributor, without being gated by either hardware availability or employer requirements.
It's far, far more likely to be Western, then Eastern Europe, followed by Asia, which displaces the U.S., if it's to happen any time soon. So much for those who complain about outsourcing...
-- Terry
Glibly... if OSS dies, Microsoft wins it all.
(Let's pretend Apple doesn't exist so I can save some keystrokes here.)
Sun wants to encourage continued improvements in the quality and versatility of what people can get without paying MS. This way, people can continue to buy non-Windows computers, Java continues being relevant, and MS works harder to produce (or at least to tollerate) useful innovations because they have credible competition to keep them honest.
Privacy Statement: We value your privacy! It is very valuable. That's why we try to sell it whenever we can.
You can see how the current model is unsustainable by the lack of full fledged Free OS distributions available out there.
expandfairuse.org
If you go back before 1983 you'll see source used to be open by default. The GNU was originally more a *reactionary* movement (to source closing), not so much a *revolutionary* movement. Lets go back to the days where all commercial software was delivered as source code to be compiled at the machine it is delivered to! Hehehe. No, seriously. At least make the code available.
>>
Free software will outlive Sun's program and Sun itself because people who need code will always be better off with free software.
>>
"People who need code" overwhelmingly choose my (commercial, closed source -- http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ ) hobby project over my OSS competitor (bingo-cards, feel free to look it up on Sourceforge) because mine actually works. Without a monetary incentive (and $10,000 in 2007 was a nice monetary incentive, and likely far more than Sun will be paying out to key developers on projects of much more importance) geeks don't just magically materialize and start solving problems like "3rd grade ESL teachers in the United States don't have enough software written for them yet" (picked one of my customer groups at random).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Even in those cases where source code was supplied, it was paid for and permission to alter it wasn't necessarily given. It wasn't "free" in the way RMS defined it. In any case, there was a lot of code written in assembly prior to 1983 so those couldn't be compiled. In addition in the 1960's most computer customers rented their computers and many of them didn't even employ programmers.
If you think about it, RMS had little experience in the computer business at the time he created GNU and doesn't have much more now.
...you work out of mommy and daddy's basement and eat their food and drive their car(s)?
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
If someone can't afford to give their work away for free, they have no business writing FOSS.
The only people allowed to make money from FOSS are Richard Stallman, Teh Lunis (aka the two FOSSie Gods), and then of course IBM and Sun. Note that Red Hate is excluded, because we hate them for trying to make money from Teh Lunix and not being IBM or Sun. His Holiness Richard Stallman has told us to be openly hostile to any and all business and commerical interests (besides IBM or Sun), and so we shall. Amen.
This isn't meant to make them money. Like all things FOSS, it's only about attacking Microsoft.
Well, it's also how Sun is going to help boost their ownership of Teh Lunix, same as what IBM does. IBM has an IBM school on IBM property with IBM teachers and IBM equipment... but don't think that means Teh Lunix is affiliated in any way with IBM or anything. Bwahahaha!!! How do us FOSSies keep a straight face when we call it "free"?