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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.'"
The answer, of course, is that corporations should not be permitted to make a profit. That was the intention behind establishing corporations in the first place, that they be a limited liability group that makes no profit and whose sole justification for existence is that they perform a public good.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
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.
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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
It's an investment in their future. It will hopefully attract new developers, improve their software and get some new ideas in the mix.
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."
....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
I can see it now.
Little bags of green shrinkwrapped to dvd's with slogans such as "Sun. Don't you want to get nicely toasted?" or "Sparc it up!"
It improves the quality and attractiveness of software for which they sell professional support, services, etc.
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.
Please pay me,
--an open source author.
My blog
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.
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.
I'm not sure if I'd call it poison. Those projects look like things which help with the livelyhood and profitability of Sun Microsystems.
If Sun wants to give some compensation to the developers that have helped them make money, and the developers don't mind accepting, what's wrong with it? It is certainly fair.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
You're both right. People need to make a living - being a philanthropist pays badly by definition. On the other hand, the people who pay are the people who set your agenda - and you are essentially working for the boss. If the open part is the only thing you're interested in, that is ok. Me, however, have some other motivations. One of them is the ability to set my agenda - as an individual or as a group - based on technical merits and such, not based on the agenda by big corporations and stock holders.
The problem is when Sun etc. start paying, the pool of available programmers decreases for other projects, and big corporations start setting the agenda of the open source community. If I were Microsoft or Google (summer of code), this sounds like a good strategy... just hand out some cash to the communities which don't threaten you in any way, grow them, and thus minimize the communities which might threaten you.
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'.
Great, now open source software will go downhill due to bad programming and bad UIs
Don't worry, we'll still have fast & reliable tech-support... oh wait.
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'm still wondering what the catch is..
I note that you have to register (didn't see any cost associated), and you're supposed to put a service tag on your machine (download and print yourself), and I'm just wondering if a bill for an OS is going to turn up one day, so I'm treading very carefully. ("if it sounds too good to be true then it probably is")
anyone?
I think it's interesting that I "pre-ordered" thier freebie Solaris months before it came out and I never got mine...
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.
(somewhat off-topic)
.ISO images was a lengthy process as my usually speedy drive spent a large amount of time at 1-2x.
Funny that you mention ordering frisbees.
I paid the $34 to get the 8 DVD set-I like the extras and I guess I'm just a sucker.
Well, (for those of you who don't know) the packaging has all 8 DVDs stacked loosely on top of each other with little finger press things at the top and bottom to release. The design is probably cost effective, but the discs can rotate againt each other and this sure beats up the surface of the discs. The top 4 discs were well marked on the outer third/quarter and the top two discs (OS install discs-SPARC and x86 underneath) were the most marked. Copying the discs to
Scanning the discs with Nero CD-DVD speed netted a quality score was 0 as there were numerous C2 errors (Lite-on 20A1P). After reburning to another DVD, the install on a second virtual machine was much much faster.
If my only drive was sensitive, this 1st time eval install would have had me cursing Sun and their packaging.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I particularily like this quote:
In other words, what Microsoft considered "worst case scenario" 10 years ago has already happened. The only thing left for them is compatibility with third party software and existing documents. If they lose their office monopoly they are in serious trouble. With both ODF and PDF now ISO standards, things are looking bright. PDF is already a de-facto standard for publishing and with readily available tools to convert between the two... Be afraid Redmond, be very afraid.
That's pretty much what Scott McNealy (Chairman of Sun) said at a recent talk I attended Imperial College (London, UK). He emphasised (a lot!) Sun's provision of computing power (the Sun Grid), "the network is the computer" and the benefits of open source software.
Most of all he emphasised the price (£0!) of all the software we (the students) could download for free from Sun, like OpenSolaris etc, etc. I thought this was strange -- every PC here already runs Linux (about half are dual boot with Windows), and the MSDNAA thing means I can get all Microsoft wants to offer for free anyway, although I haven't bothered yet. I think he should have put a lot more emphasis on the freedom to modify the code, look at the code, redistribute etc, given his audience.
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.
...you work out of mommy and daddy's basement and eat their food and drive their car(s)?
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Jesus saves. Buddha makes incremental backups
Got to be the best sig yet!! and so few words!
cheers
Bob
It Seems I've developed an aversion to proprietary software
Aw, that's crap. I knew there had to be a catch.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Agreed that Science and Business are two different callings. The open nature of Science has been at odds with the closed nature of business. One is based on the synergistic effects of cooperation, while the other is stimulated by competition. The balance between cooperation and competition is one of those fundamental questions (like freedom vs security). Note that some do promote bringing the "Science" back to "Computer Science".
You can charge for GPL software, so that matters not at all. In terms of making changes, rumor has it that as much BSD code was absorbed into ATT Unix as ATT Unix code made its way into BSD. Hence the current state of affairs after the settlement... While source code wasn't Free at that point, it certainly wasn't Closed as we know code to be closed, today.
Yeah, I know. Quite annoying. Especially annoyed at the 3 e-mails I've received in the last 24 hours asking me how I'm enjoying my Solaris10 install and wanting me to sign up for service. They're about to get tagged as spam in my gmail.
.exe to .iso extraction overnight and haven't yet burned to disk and booted - maybe this weekend.)
Haven't yet installed it... (set the
While I am quite put off by their aggressiveness in trying to get me to sign up I will still try it out though, but probably end up reverting back to Ubuntu unless it is particularly outstanding.
Your original statement was: "If you go back before 1983 you'll see source used to be open by default."
Unix is just one OS that was invented long after computers were in common use, so it can't be used as evidence to prove your statement. The primary reason why Unix ended up being "open" was because of the poor IP management that ATT did. It obviously wasn't ATT intention or there wouldn't have been any reason for a settlement.
Well, but I can remember. It wasn't just ATT. Operating Systems, as well as updates, came as source code on tape. It was a big deal recompiling for a University's main computer. Also a lot of the patches were from universities that tweaked the code and then shared their insights. And, by the way, Unix was more than one OS even in the description I previously posted.