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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.'"
It's an investment in their future. It will hopefully attract new developers, improve their software and get some new ideas in the mix.
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."
Does anyone know where can I contribute money to help revitalize Pakistan's nuclear weapons program?
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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 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.