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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.'"
I got an e-mail from Sun the other day offering to send me Solaris on DVD, and if I activate it within 45 days, they'll also send me some gift certificates for various restaurants. I think it's funny that they're kind of bribing people into trying Solaris.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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.
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."
And who really cares where in the world the work's done? It's *open*.
Can they start on the divers, please?
Mind you, can't see Sun paying for people to write drivers for other people hardware...shame.
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.
By selling technology based on these open-source products. OpenSolaris is particularly important in this respect, because Sun is still primarily a hardware vendor, and the more features Solaris has, the more sellable are Solaris-based systems. Also, like all high-end hardware vendors, Sun is becoming more and more a service provider and system integrator. The better the software is, the easier it is to sell these services. The fact that anybody can use the software without paying for it is actually a plus, because it makes the software a de facto standard.
Believe it or not, the entire Open Source industry is based on this logic. Companies spend big bucks creating or extending OS software. Usually they just hire programmers to do it, but offering prizes to eager volunteers is better publicity, and much cheaper.
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.
Why would we outsource open source software? Is there really that little interest in FOSS in the US, EU, etc.?
My guess is this has nothing to do with generosity towards open sources at all. It probably has more to do with issues like OpenDS where owners of the project more or less got strong armed/fired. Sounds like developers are not happy at Sun and perhaps this is a subtle message to those developers at Sun.
A large still falling tech company I used to work for in 1995 brought in "cheap" Indian programmers to squelch the need for raises. Man, they could talk your head off, they had all the verbiage down with that accent. But it soon became apparent that while they could talk the talk, none could walk the walk. Management liked their games but it ultimately backfired. As most of us started looking at why are we working for you and you pay like crap? While we enjoyed the work, most of us started looking. Most of us that left got sizable raises (30-100%) and left. Most others that stayed got layed off. They moved the development to India where from what former cohorts tell me, the project outright failed. Shows too in their stock value.
It was so bad that one Indian that had actually been with us for quite some time, and could walk the walk and not just talk stated when he resigned, "I can go to India, make 1/3 the salary I make here, but I will live like a king and have my own servants. And with my experience, be upper level management in no time." I heard just before I left, he wasn't kidding.
Until this business starts losing the Dilbert managers and paying for quality producers, they will flounder like fish on the carpet.
BTW, I never looked back since leaving this floundering tech company.
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.
The fact that someone is offering money for OSS development doesn't really take anything away from the people that have their own strong interests that no one is offering money for. It might even broaden the community of people willing to work on OSS without pay, since there'll be a limited number of paid gigs available, and the best way to qualify yourself for them is to get intimately familiar with the software for which they are offered -- and the best way to do that is to actually work on it.
This presumes that the pool of programmers who will work on OSS is fixed, so that whoever takes the pay is coming out of the pool of people who would otherwise do it for free. But making money available means that you are more likely to pull people who otherwise wouldn't work on OSS into the OSS development world.
Plus, a whole lot of OSS development is done for pay now, by paid employees of firms like Sun, IBM, etc. Heck, offering bounties for particular features from the community isn't new, either.
How does this work? Getting paid to work on a feature in, say, OpenJDK doesn't make you less capable of turning around and implementing an open source project (for free or paid for by a competitor) that might challenge Sun's Java.
If anything, it makes you more capable of doing that, if you were inclined to do so.
No, he states that he believs that most of the expansion in open source programming will be in India. Considering raw population numbers and development trends, that's probably not an entirely unreasonable assumption.
The US and Western Europe, for instance, probably have as a high a percentage of their population programming as they are going to have, and the split between open source and proprietary is probably pretty stable (not that it won't change over time, but there is a lot of inertia built in).
India has quite a lot of people, is seeing lots of growth in the tech field, and is a lot more fluid in how the structure of its tech industry will shake out. So, yeah, lots of growth in open source development is likely there, and spending any given amount of money to encourage that growth is likely to have a lot more effect there, not only because of the greater practical value of the same amount of money in India, but because a lot less of India's programmers or potential new programmers are entrenched in an existing system and unlikely to change their behavior without a major incentive.
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.
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