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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.'"
Sun now needs active outside communities around the products they are open sourcing. The thing is, they demand the copyrights to anything that goes into their trees. Many who would normally contribute to a project won't with that stipulation especially since Sun is a for-profit entity. In effect, they are offering compensation for the copyrights they insist on having.
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.