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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.
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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."
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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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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.