Is It Good For Business To Subsidize OSS Developers?

ruphus13 writes "A lot of developers for open source software have full-time day jobs too. As economist Milton Friedman said, 'The business of business is business.' So, does it make sense for companies to encourage their developers to contribute to the open source community? OStatic discusses a blog post by Alfresco exec Matt Asay, who makes the case for why they should. '"Companies like IBM, Intel, SGI, MIPS, Freescale, HP, etc. are all working to ensure that Linux runs well on their hardware. That, in turn, makes their offerings more attractive to Linux users, resulting in increased sales." While I don't think we'll ever see companies everywhere subsidizing employee development of open source tools, many tech and non-tech companies alike could benefit from subsidizing open source development from employees with talent. If more companies woke up to this idea, we'd see more purpose-driven, mission-critical open source software shared by firms in the same industries. That, ultimately, would benefit the companies providing the subsidies.' Should your employer pay you for time spent on open source development?" snydeq points out an Infoworld story suggesting that there's something to learn from the way French companies are promoting open-source development.

Comments

Define "Good"

[Mateo_LeFou]

Is it "good" to maintain and expand the upstream rain forest that provides your raw materials?

It's not good for this week's balance sheet, but it's good if you think about it for five minutes.

Re:Define "Good"

[Chemisor]

Who wants to think?

Re:Define "Good"

[Mateo_LeFou]

Um, business owners who wish not to be competed out of existence by other business owners who think

The French seems to be leading the US these days

[Anonymous Coward]

From FOSS, to nuclear power.

Yes.

[Darkness404]

Most businesses use at least one major OSS project, be it Linux, Apache, MySQL, or perhaps even an OSS language like Perl, Python or Ruby. And a lot of minor businesses lack a good programmer to fix bugs, so it should be natural for them to pay some OSS developers to fix a bug, or add in a new feature.

Re:Yes.

[TheRaven64]

More importantly, most businesses don't make software. They either:

1. Make things that use software, or
2. Make things using software.

Free Software has the convenient side effect for these businesses that it makes software not just a commodity, but a very cheap commodity. For businesses in the first category, that means people have more money to spend on their products. For businesses in the second category it means that they reduce their operating costs.

This is exactly why Microsoft has tried to encourage something like a Free Software ecosystem around their products. MS Office is not Free Software, but it has a set of developer tools that allow your company to hire someone else to extend it in ways specific to your business needs. You then aren't locked in to a single supplier for these modifications (assuming you are sensible, and use a work-for-hire contract so you own the rights to them). You can do it in-house, or contract it out to one of a great many small companies. Free Software just broadens this idea. The more of your stack is Free Software, the less you rely on a single source, and the safer your business is.

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Paying an OSS developer to fix a bug or add a feature seems like it would be simple, but unfortunately it's not.

First, most OSS projects work on a charity model. "You give us money, we work on whatever we feel like." You can ask for whatever feature or bugfix you want, but the devs won't work on it unless they want to. There's nothing wrong with that -- as I implied, most charities work in exactly this way -- but it means that there is literally no way, other than hiring the dev into your company directly, to get a specific feature or bugfix added to most OSS projects.

There are, of course, companies which form around OSS software specifically to do work-for-hire. The problem there is that the work they do for you typically ends up back in the OSS project. Logical enough: that is the way OSS is supposed to work, after all. But it removes any competitive advantage you have, and it's contrary to the way software contracting has traditionally worked (where the company to whom the programmers are contracted will usually have the rights for the software).

The way some OSS companies get around this is with a dual license. As long as all the copyright holders for your OSS product are on board with the idea, then great. But the Linux kernel, for example, can never be dual-licensed (for the same reason it will never be anything but GPLv2). Most popular OSS software is actually in the same situation as the Linux kernel. So it's tough.

Unfortunately, the best way to support OSS is by hiring outright the developers who are worth anything. This will largely rob them from the OSS community (because the only reason to hire them is to compel them to close any future code they write for you), but...

Re:Yes.

[FooAtWFU]

My business did this just the other day (we ran into a nasty bug in Perl which was inducing fun memory leaks). Paid a guy $500ish (practically nothing!) to get it fixed a few months faster than it would have normally gotten fixed so we could drop a nicer version in one of our upcoming release. It worked out fairly well for us.

Re:Yes.

[maxume]

Compared to professional labor working in an office environment, Vista+Office is already a cheap commodity.

Free Software is doomed if it tries to compete on price (widespread perception is that MS Office is the best office software; Microsoft is making enormous profits and could still operate while charging much less); Free Software needs to compete on quality.

Linux on servers, Apache, etc., back up this assertion.

Re:Yes.

[Darkness404]

Compared to professional labor working in an office environment, Vista+Office is already a cheap commodity.

Wrong. A decent computer running Vista costs about $400 for a desktop and about $600 for a laptop. You can easily get the same or better performance out of a $250-300 desktop or a $400 laptop with Linux. Office Small Business costs $269 (http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8182593&st=2007+office&type=product&id=1164154035835) for a license. So that leaves you with $669 for a desktop and $869 for a laptop. Are there some jobs that need Office? Yes. But for most businesses Open Office is the better choice.

Free Software is doomed if it tries to compete on price (widespread perception is that MS Office is the best office software; Microsoft is making enormous profits and could still operate while charging much less); Free Software needs to compete on quality.

And they already compete with quality. For example, if you take Office 2007 and have someone who has used previous versions of Office and had them do a simple task they would be completely confused. Take that same person and give them OOo and they would be able to work it just fine. Sure, Office has more features, but Office costs more in training and in price.

Re:Yes.

[Darkness404]

Paying an OSS developer to fix a bug or add a feature seems like it would be simple, but unfortunately it's not. First, most OSS projects work on a charity model. "You give us money, we work on whatever we feel like." You can ask for whatever feature or bugfix you want, but the devs won't work on it unless they want to. There's nothing wrong with that -- as I implied, most charities work in exactly this way -- but it means that there is literally no way, other than hiring the dev into your company directly, to get a specific feature or bugfix added to most OSS projects.

Developer != project. Any programmer with a bit of knowledge of the sourcecode and how the program works should be able to do a simple bugfix on an OSS project. Just because you e-mailed RMS about a bugfix on Emacs and he declined the offer doesn't mean that Joe Programmer can't fix the bug.

There are, of course, companies which form around OSS software specifically to do work-for-hire. The problem there is that the work they do for you typically ends up back in the OSS project. Logical enough: that is the way OSS is supposed to work, after all. But it removes any competitive advantage you have, and it's contrary to the way software contracting has traditionally worked (where the company to whom the programmers are contracted will usually have the rights for the software).

Unless you make software, software should not give you any more of an advantage. The product you sell and the employees you hire should give you the advantage, yes, upgrading your desktops will give you a possible productivity boost, but for most businesses technology should stay in the background. If I am at a restaurant, I am going to go to wherever has fast service, and cheap and decent food. If having a new cash register helps them do that fine. If having a new server helps them do that, fine. But the main object for them is to sell the most food to make the most money, that is what gives them a competitive advantage, not a new server.

Re:Yes.

[maxume]

A desktop+Vista+Office is going to last for about 3 years. So over 3 years, you save, say, $1,000 with Linux (this amount is preposterous). Over those same 3 years, if you are lucky, you will have paid the professional office worker about $150,000 in salary (with at least another $50,000 in overhead directly related to employing that person, and probably another $50,000 of overhead that is less directly related).

So the computer costs, maybe, $2,000 over 3 years, and the person costs at least $250,000 over 3 years. The software+computer is a cheap commodity compared to the person. It can still make sense to save money on the software+computer, but the person better not lose even 1% of their productivity.

Re:Yes.

[Whitemice]

Unless you make software, software should not give you any more of an advantage. The product you sell and the employees you hire should give you the advantage, yes, upgrading your desktops will give you a possible productivity boost, but for most businesses technology should stay in the background.

I couldn't agree more. Bringing technology into the foreground enables innovation and [potentially] massive improvements in efficiency and methods. I go to lots of IT conferences where speakers say over and over that IT is now a commodity - they're just wrong. Through IT companies can do allot to help their competitiveness - but not if they keep technology in the background.

If I am at a restaurant, I am going to go to wherever has fast service, and cheap and decent food. If having a new cash register helps them do that fine. If having a new server helps them do that, fine. But the main object for them is to sell the most food to make the most money, that is what gives them a competitive advantage, not a new server.

This isn't a realistic example. Most businesses, and certainly that businesses that sell products or services to other businesses, do not sell-X. They sell a relationship which involves information and allot of "soft" value surrounding the product or service.

Re:Yes.

[TheRaven64]

But how much does a bug in MS Office cost you in lost productivity? Last time I used MS Office in a corporate environment there was a bug that caused it to crash and lose data that was triggered regularly by the in-house templating system. Every time I encountered it, I tended to lose around half a page of text. Possibly other people in the organisation were more used to it, so saved more often and only lost the time spent relaunching Office.

What options did they have? They could try to work around the bug somehow, but they couldn't fix it (they did have the source code for Office for auditing but their license didn't allow recompiling it). They could ask MS to fix the bug, which they eventually did, and then they had to buy the next version of Office (you don't think MS would back-port a fix do you?), with a slightly incompatible file format, meaning that they had to roll it out across the entire organisation.

Now, imagine they'd been using OpenOffice.org, and had encountered the same bug. They could have contracted Novell or Sun, both of whom have teams with intimate knowledge of the OO.o codebase, or they could have fixed it in-house. If a fix was released in a new version with a new file format (e.g. on the transition to ODF) and they didn't want to deploy it over the entire organisation they could have paid someone to back-port it to their version and just deployed the fix.

Which do you think would have been cheaper in the long run?

Re:Why

[francium de neobie]

There's no "beg" here. OSS developers get funding because companies think their free software benefit them. e.g. Apple *needs* WebKit because it's critical that they have it, and can customize it, on the iPhone.

Collective action problem

[dash2]

Why would a business pay for software that benefits everybody else? Why not just wait for someone else to do it?

There are answers to this question - e.g. IBM or Google is big enough and uses Linux enough that it needs to make the fixes just for its own benefit; pushing them upstream is not much extra work. Or, companies in long-term relationships - e.g. in the Silicon Valley ecosystem - can encourage each other to contribute to public goods like OSS via a "reputation mechanism" - contributors get respect and this translates into better relationships.

But the CAP is the fundamental issue.

Re:Collective action problem

[QuantumG]

This attitude that business is being charitable to open source when they push changes upstream is just, well, ignorant.

They push their changes upstream because they don't want to have to keep merging them in every time a new version comes out. If they didn't push them upstream they'd either have to weigh down their development team with annoying merging duties or they'd have to stick with outdated versions of the software.

The fact that they can push stuff that possibly is completely useless to everyone else upstream and have it accepted as part of the build is one of the wonders of open source.. and, if anything, it's the upstream developers who are being charitable.

Re:Collective action problem

[Just Some Guy]

Why would a business pay for software that benefits everybody else? Why not just wait for someone else to do it?

To scratch an itch. My company needed a fast way to convert FoxPro files to PostgreSQL, so I wrote one. Now, we're not in the database format conversion business, so this isn't something our competitors would be waiting to pounce on. Why on Earth would we want to keep it locked up? I've already gotten bug reports and feature requests that made it work better for us, so we actually came out ahead by giving it away.

Honestly, especially for projects outside a company's direct business plan, I can't think of a single reason not to subsidize FOSS. You needed it and were going to write it anyway, right?

Re:Collective action problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd go even further than that -- a lot of businesses make the choice to use "cheap, lightweight" open source products specifically so they don't have to pay the software maintenance costs themselves or stump up for a support contract. The business response at the top is often "if we wanted to spend cash on the software, we'd have gone to Oracle/Microsoft/etc instead of picking this open source gubbins".

Re:Collective action problem

[Kjella]

Well, yes and no. Simple bugfixes are obviously best to push upstream, the bigger question is added/customized functionality which really adds value. At some point the value of having exclusive functionality exceeds the merge costs, depending on a boatload of factors ranging from interface complexity and stability, business value, use by competitors, specificness of the issue solved and so on. Very many companies are afraid to give away anything of value or just don't rationally calculate what it costs them to maintain it themselves, so they'd rather keep it inhouse instead even if they rationally should have open source it. But it's too drastic to go to the other extreme and say that open sourcing code isn't being charitable.

Re:Collective action problem

[adamthehutt]

Great point. CAP, of course, is one of the classic market failures.

An analogy is industry lobbying. When (to take an unpopular example) oil companies lobby for subsidies and tax breaks, the resulting legislation not only benefits them, but also all of their industry competitors. Often in practice the Exxon-Mobils of the world pull the laboring oars while the smaller companies get to freeload. But a more common scenario is the establishment of industry associations, supported by a wide number of players, who take on the role of industry advocacy. A classic example (and another unpopular one) would be the RIAA.

There are some industry associations out there backing open source, but I suspect we'll see more emerge in the coming years, and their tactics will become more sophisticated.

Re:Collective action problem

[Penguinisto]

In at least one case I can think of, no one else will do it. My soon-to-be-former hardware-based employer is a great example (I got a better offer, and went for it). The folks I'm about to leave behind uses Linux very, very heavily. Their entire software backend to the product is written with (and for) Linux.

Linux made perfect sense for them since they're selling hardware, Linux/FOSS means it won't cost a mint to license out, and it means a HUGE amount of flexibility for the programmers.

...so it's not just reputation or charity that factors in. It's also the more hard-nosed business reasons: cost, flexibility, stability, etc.

/P

Re:Collective action problem

[Anonymous Coward]

The company I work for (small to mid-sized global company, about 50k employees) uses quite a lot of open source. We do so not to avoid support contracts, but to avoid license fees. We used to use a LOT of proprietary stuff, and we were stung with big license fees (we include third-party code inside our own products) as well as support fees. Now that we use open source, we still pay support fees (but to different people - companies that specifically deal in supporting open source projects), but we no longer pay license fees. We still charge the same amount for our products though, so we're getting more profit these days.

Re:Collective action problem

[dvice_null]

> Why would a business pay for software that benefits everybody else?

If they do that, they will

a) They will look better in the eyes of open source community. And trust me, you want this, because we are usually those who tell others what they should buy.

b) They become more attractive employer to those who are most talented. Like me ;) . I would love to work for an open source project and I'm not alone.

c) They usually benefit from it directly also. For example if it is a text editor they decide to support, they can use that software themselves and they get to call the shots or at least make the fixes that are important to them. Quite many companies have their own internal tools, but if the project would be open source, they might get testing support and bug reports from the outside and even patches.

d) They might even join forces with their competitors, so that they would share the costs but also share the benefits. This would mean that both parties would benefit from it equally so they would not give advantage to the other, but on the other hand they could cut their development costs.

Re:Collective action problem

[colonslash]

I just started an open source project at work. My reasons are:

1. To learn about the technology
2. To make tools that make the data we sell more readily accessible and usable
3. To use the tools I make in my own work
4. To help advertise our company (through source code) to people who may not otherwise consider buying our data

I think my reasons all help my company.

The part of my contribution that doesn't is pissing off our larger software partners, like Oracle, by making and promoting free products that are in competition with their pricey and bloated offerings.

Re:Collective action problem

[mdfst13]

At some point the value of having exclusive functionality exceeds the merge costs, depending on a boatload of factors ranging from interface complexity and stability, business value, use by competitors, specificness of the issue solved and so on.

In the short term, that can certainly be true. However, what happens when you merge it for the fourth, tenth, etc. time? Especially as the merge tends to get more difficult over time. Also, note that the more work it is to add the functionality, then the more work it is to merge the functionality.

Another issue is that if the functionality is actually useful to someone else, someone will probably eventually upload it to the project in some form. If your company does this, then your upgrade path is usually pretty clear. If someone else does this, then the upgrade path can be far more difficult. Merging will also be more difficult (you may need to rip out functionality before adding your own).

Conversely, if your company is first to upload and your competitors need to migrate from their platform to your platform, that's often as much work as writing their own solution. In the long term, both of you will be better off, as you'll save on maintenance. In the short term, their migration is likely to cost enough that you don't lose by offering them your software.

There may be circumstances where it's better to hold your changes private, but those are going to be rare. Two competitors both using the same open source software as base but only one having implemented a particular feature. Said feature being relatively isolated from the rest of the codebase (such that there is little interaction that will be costly to merge). The feature being highly important to the business. Maybe. But event then, what happens if the competitor without the feature adds it? Then the first company has to either port their version or keep maintaining their version.

Re:Collective action problem

[tlhIngan]

Why would a business pay for software that benefits everybody else? Why not just wait for someone else to do it?

Depends on the product.

For silicon manufacturers (Intel, Marvell, Freescale, TI, etc), there is a benefit to investing in OSS development - it helps them sell more chips. Some manufacturesrs, Marvell and Freescale in particular, require NDAs in order to develop software. (For Marvell, this is particularly funny, since the PXA25x, PXA27x CPU manuals used to be available freely via Intel's site, but for Marvell, it now requires an NDA). Freescale and TI also require NDA to get manuals.

So if "someone else" is some random kernel hacker, they won't be able to get these datasheets.

The other reason is when it's time to pick a chip for a new product, OS support is often a consideration. A company could develop Linux for an unsupported processor, but then again, it depends how much time, money and manpower that will take versus the cost of picking a different processor where all its features are already supported. Given that time to market is an important consideration, the time it takes to develop Linux could mean the difference between first to release and also-ran.

So it's effectively in these company's interest to develop Linux - they help sell product.

Re:Collective action problem

[Whitemice]

To scratch an itch. My company needed a fast way to convert FoxPro files to PostgreSQL, so I wrote one. Now, we're not in the database format conversion business, so this isn't something our competitors would be waiting to pounce on. Why on Earth would we want to keep it locked up? I've already gotten bug reports and feature requests that made it work better for us, so we actually came out ahead by giving it away.

Honestly, especially for projects outside a company's direct business plan, I can't think of a single reason not to subsidize FOSS. You needed it and were going to write it anyway, right?

Exactly. I contribute patches to a couple of Open Source projects. My primary employer uses those packages but they don't relate to our line of business - they are general purpose. Improvements in those packages just allow us to build on more functionality that does relate the primary line of business. Hiding them doesn't have value, it is even bad. A project with new and better features will attract more users who will potentially contribute to the project.... and we'll probably consome those features.

Re:Collective action problem

[Xtifr]

One thing you left out (or, at least, under-emphasized): if you push your changes back upstream, then you're no longer the sole maintainer of your fork, and others likely (almost certainly) can and will help maintain and enhance and fix the bugs. That's always a big win.

The flip side of this (something I've actually encountered) is when your add-ons are so specific to your particular company that upstream isn't interested in accepting your patches.

I've gotten paid, here-and-there, to send patches upstream to various free/libre/open-source projects since the mid eighties. No company I've worked for has ever regretted such actions, but one, as I mentioned above, once regretted their inability to perform such an action.

Re:Collective action problem

[nstlgc]

Talking about unwarranted self importance, LOL. This is what happens when teens try to interpret business scenarios.

Depends on the needs . . .

[Gabrill]

It comes down to the companies controlling officers opinion of the companies' needs.

On one hand, I see no motivation for small to midsized businesses to contribute to open source applications, especially those that don't relate to the business' operating needs. Each business' business model and methods are distinct enough that most software is completely proprietary, or a proprietary implementation of a base package.

On the other hand, public relations is sometimes given more consideration. Contributing to relevant open source projects can be very benificial if the package is used and useful to the company.

Re:Why

[Mateo_LeFou]

Because colossal missed opportunities arising from beneficial externalities that are not getting incorporated into the development funding.

Example: almost *everyone who has a website benefits from some part of the LAMP stack, though they pay nothing for it. This isn't a problem, as the marginal cost of the LAMP stack is zero.

But if all those beneficiaries would pool a fair price -- or 5% of a fair price -- for that code, and put it into more development .. well, I can barely imagine how fast the stack would improve.

evidence free

[dash2]

Wow, that article on the French is an evidence-free zone. The only actual French OSS project they mention is some middleware doodah that I've never even heard of. Trying to think of some myself... um:

1. Mandrake
2. ...er ...
3. ... that's it.

I'm sure there are others but none springs to mind.

Re:evidence free

[Yetihehe]

Spip. One of the worst cms out there. And all it's code is in french, so nobody else outside France can make too much of it.

Re:evidence free

[Tranzistors]

http://glpi-project.org/

Re:evidence free

[Anonymous Coward]

How about VLC?

Re:evidence free

[Anonymous Coward]

vlc ?

Re:evidence free

[erlehmann]

AFAIK, VLC is of French origin.

Re:evidence free

[TheRaven64]

Free.fr, a French ISP, is a big supporter of Free Software. They host a lot of the FSF sites and also GNA.org, for non-GNU projects (we use them). You may have noticed some other projects developed by French people and hosted on free.fr. The ones that spring immediately to mind are FFMPEG, VLC, and QEMU.

Re:evidence free

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it's certainly being talked about:
here
here
here
and here

Re:evidence free

[Anonymous Coward]

Free.fr actually ships you a minimalistic linux box as modem; it streams the VOD through vlc, can record shows on it's hdd, and they even encourage you to hack it. I'd say that's pretty awesome, even without comparing prices or snooping practices with US ISPs...

Re:evidence free

[theocrite]

Wow, that article on the French is an evidence-free zone. The only actual French OSS project they mention is some middleware doodah that I've never even heard of. Trying to think of some myself... um:

1. Mandrake
2. ...er ...
3. ... that's it.

I'm sure there are others but none springs to mind.

Actually it's Mandriva. Using Mandrake is no more allowed, because of Mandrake the magician ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandriva_Linux#Name_changes )

Well Mandriva is just an example of software tagged "French" (not by Mandriva itself, but it's often referred as "French distro" or something).
As you guessed, we can find some other examples of software started by french people (videolan, Xfce, azureus, libcaca, sympa, frozen-bubble[2] etc.).

But is it important ? Is Mandriva really a French distro ? Mandriva now owns Conectiva (from Brazil) and Lycoris (from USA). So it's more 50% French, 25% US and 25% Brazilian. But wait it's using a kernel started by a Finnish guy, and a Desktop Environment born in (and still hugdely attached to) Germany...
You know were i'm heading. I don't think counting the number or "French OSS projects" is a good measure of how much France is involved or not in FLOSS. Perhaps we can find more valuables way to measure it. For instance by finding some projects where French people are really involved :

• Gnome :
  • http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/random/GnomeWorldWideHuge.jpg (I agree, we don't see much here. Just a bunch of points somewhere in West Europa)
• KDE :
  • http://worldwide.kde.org/pics/fullmap.jpeg
  • http://commit-digest.org/mappy/?view=2008-08-17&scheme=map_default&region=world&mode=embedded&standalone=no
• Debian
  • http://www.debian.org/devel/developers.loc (Same remark as Gnome)

We can also looks at studies and statistics :

• http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/Final-2b.htm#_Toc14094379
• http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9992379-16.html

This part was only about FLOSS development, we could also study FLOSS use or lots of different things. Well, i think my post is long enough already (sorry when i start, i just can't stop) so i won't cover all this. One last thing : I have no clue about other countries, but there is a lot of movement around FLOSS : Events :

• RMLL/LSM (Libre Software Meeting) : http://2008.rmll.info/?lang=en
• Paris Capitale du Libre (Paris http://en.paris-libre.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&task=&id=0&Itemid=1
• Solutions Linux : http://www.solutionslinux.fr/
• FOSSDEM http://fosdem.org/ (That's true i lied again, it's not in France, but in Belgium. In Brussels, the French speaking part of Belgium)

There are also powerful Associations and usersgroups like April ( http://april.org/index.html.en )
Well April is Involved in so many things (promotion of FLOSS, lobyying, meetings with politics, action groups against tying, against treacherous computing, against software patents, against OOXML normalizat

Re:evidence free

[Anonymous Coward]

Wasn't StarOffice originally commented in German and despite changes after being acquired by Sun, quite a lot was still in German when OpenOffice.org was launched? So the fact that an open source project isn't in English doesn't mean that it cannot take off and later (inevitably) be dominated by English. Now, I've never read code comments in French or German so I cannot personally attest to how comprehensible they are to someone like me that does speak both to some extent. Perhaps they are good and consistent since there are enough speakers of both to include a large number of programmers since in that case the need for a consistent and stable terminology has been sufficient - unlike the case with either of my native languages, Swedish and Finnish. Neither I nor anybody I've ever worked with could even imagine commenting code in those since the terminology is too inconsistent because a lot of introductory computer science books use translated terms that the translators have made up when needed (and thus vary from book to book) and more advanced books aren't available as translations. And academia obviously writes in English to cater to a wider audience. The situation is also not improved by linguists that want to prevent the ever greater influence of English and consequently offer their "help" - despite extremely limited understanding of computers (let alone programming).

Re:evidence free

[Lafeek]

The French members of parliament are using Kubuntu: Feedback from French Members of Parliament Following the Migration of their Desktop Computers to Free Software

Re:evidence free

[Douglas Goodall]

I have worked on hardware and software that was developed by both the Japanese and the Germans. The firmware documentation was in both. The Japanese was never readable to me, and the german was made up of words longer than 20 characters each. As an American software engineer, I wish the doc were in English. But I know there is a whole world out there of people who speak and think in other languages. Some people think the only real doc is the code, but when the procedure names and function names and data names are in a foreign language, determining the functionality of non-trivial code is problematic, closer to reverse engineering.

Re:evidence free

[dash2]

Wow, now I'm persuaded. You should have written the original article!

Re:evidence free

[dash2]

I wonder what they thought of KDE 4.0 :-)

Re:evidence free

[CyberPack]

We use a couple of what seem to be French OSS packages: OCS Inventory New Generation (http://www.ocsinventory-ng.org) for our hardware/software inventory and GLPI (http://glpi-project.org) for our help desk/trouble tickets.

Re:Why

[BlueParrot]

Well, according to the Free Software Foundation:

'Freedom is a matter of liberty, not price. Think of free as in "free speech" not "free beer".'

DARPA?

[dfetter]

It's silly to put basic research and (more generally) the development and maintenance of public goods in the hands of public companies because their motivations are not even vaguely in that ballpark. "The market" isn't good at providing the things that make markets possible, as the years since Reagan took office have shown. Markets are powerful tools for optimizing certain kinds of behavior, but they are not self-hosting.

If we as a society don't spend that money on basic research and other public goods like FLOSS, we're spending down our base assets and not replenishing them.

Most FOSS projects need subsidies of some kind

[pieterh]

It's inherent in successful FOSS projects that they work with their users, and when these users are businesses, it's usually win-win for the businesses to invest something in the projects they depend on.

* they pay anyhow, and it's better to pay as partners than clients.
* their engineers get to learn the insides of the product and so are able to reduce the risks of using it.
* they can get their business needs incorporated into the product.
* they give their engineers a way to enjoy their work more.
* they get access to the community, which respects firms that contribute.
* they compete better in the market.

It's a small step from contributing one's own work to a project to sponsoring outside developers to work on a project, a natural form of delegation to experts.

Many small software firms have long understood that open source is about creating profitable ties to the community and market. Larger technology users have realized that close ties to the experts that make their key technologies can save them money and make their businesses work better.

Mostly, FOSS projects that don't need or seek this kind of relationship with business are those with a different market, usually individual users. But even these projects usually welcome funds, and contributions.

lost opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

The path that budding developers take is infinitely more accessible (and far less expensive) via open source. If you lose the foresight of funding that community you risk intellectual hoarding and corporate driven (read "heavily manipulated") R&D that is self serving and beleaguered with protection, IP, DRM, and general monetary ballast that ultimately imprisons creativity.

Because reinventing the wheel is really expensive.

[Anonymous Coward]

F/OSS means that you don't have to buy or write an operating system just to run a single program on a single device, or write an OS for a new piece of equipment from scratch. It means you don't have to come up with a proprietary database when you're not sure the bigger project will pan out. It means that you can support standards and undermine format monopolies, allowing you to bring your product to market despite an 800lb gorilla.

"The business of business is business" doesn't mean that short-term gain trumps long-term. It means that business, in a market economy, seeks advantages where it can find them. Having a large base of reliable free software is a big enough advantage for some companies that they happily underwrite its development.

Back-pay.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Should your employer pay you for time spent on open source development?"

People have been "paying" for OSS since it's inception. It just hasn't been a formal thing until now.

Yes, but ... GPL

[ehartwell]

The company I work for would love to subsidize open source development. We'd all love to use and extend existing projects instead of writing code from scratch. But recently I spent a couple of weeks writing a proprietary communications package when there's already perfectly good code on SourceForge.

Why? The OSS project uses the GPL. This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application. That would cost the company *a lot* more than wasting time rewriting existing code.

Whenever I start a new project I always look for existing solutions for my company to subsidize. LGPL, Apache, and the rest are fine, and that's why there's so much commercial support for those projects. It's just to damn bad there's so much GPL. Let's get the religion out of software development.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[erlehmann]

So you want to build upon others work, but not wish anyone to build upon yours ? The GPL was designed to protect against such greedy behaviour - which btw is a pragmatic decision, not a religious one.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

So, did you try to contact the developers to see if you could actually get the code under another license?

I don't know what project you are referring to, but perhaps payment would have made those developers grant you a license for that code.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[Ash-Fox]

Whenever I start a new project I always look for existing solutions for my company to subsidize. LGPL, Apache, and the rest are fine, and that's why there's so much commercial support for those projects.

I've seen plenty of commercial support for GPL projects too. KDE, Gnome, Koffice, Pidgin, Yast, Mono etc.

It's just to damn bad there's so much GPL.

In certain circumstances (proprietary libraries that disallow us redistributing the source, both licensing completely conflicting with each other, preventing us from using both) it can get annoying, but having worked on some commercial projects that involved GPL applications, it hasn't really effected much.

Let's get the religion out of software development.

I agree, I am somewhat fed up of this pointless closed source religious non-sense that people keep building.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the point of GPL, you want to own it, you write your own fucking code.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[Draek]

Free Software isn't a religion, but it's not a charity either.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[aniefer]

This problem is exactly the reason there are alternatives like the Eclipse Public License. Google has recently announced that they are adding the EPL as a license option for Google Code.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[Just Some Guy]

Why? The OSS project uses the GPL. This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application. That would cost the company *a lot* more than wasting time rewriting existing code.

First, you still own your application. It's copyrighted to you. You own it. Second, is the app one your plan on distributing? If not, then the GPL is moot.

It's just to damn bad there's so much GPL. Let's get the religion out of software development.

The GPL keeps you from taking my code and locking it up in some proprietary application where I won't get to use it. You seem to be under the unsupported belief that I should let you.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? The OSS project uses the GPL. This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application. That would cost the company *a lot* more than wasting time rewriting existing code.

That's true only if you sell software.

i can't really understand how else you could lose money.

adapting an existing software to your needs is obviously less expensive than rewriting it.

losing ownership is not a problem if you don't sell the *software*.

Note: you can still sell support and other things

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

The GPL keeps you from taking my code and locking it up in some proprietary application where I won't get to use it. You seem to be under the unsupported belief that I should let you.

How exactly can you lock up code? The code will still be distributable no matter how many proprietary projects use it. The real question is, "should we allow companies (or anyone) to profit from code without giving something back?"

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[wrook]

Let me turn it around a bit to see if it makes it easier to understand why developers choose the GPL over other, less restrictive licenses.

I have recently started writing a free software game. It will have a 3d isometric view. I will spend several weeks writing a free software graphics engine where there is already perfectly good code in proprietary programs. (Well, actually, there is probably already a free software one I can use, but let's say there isn't)

Why? The proprietary programs use their own licenses. I *might* be able to pay to license it from them, but it would cost me *far* more than I will ever recoup in my game.

Whenever I start a new project I always look for existing solutions to help. All free licenses are fine, but proprietary licenses lock me out altogether. It's just too damn bad that there's so much of it.

I hope this lets you see that I, a free software writer, encounter the same problems that you do due to our license incompatibilities. If I write software and donate it to a proprietary project, I *get nothing in return*. Usually not even a thank you. If you write software and give it to your end users, you *get nothing in return*. Well, you might get a thank you, but you probably won't get paid. Your business model is built on you forcing your users to pay money for the software.

With free software, my business model depends on my users (including other software developers) collaborating with me. That's why I often choose the GPL. If I do not get collaboration, then I don't get "paid". If you take my software and put it in a proprietary product (especially if it competes with mine), I lose. Now the functionality exists in another product, which steals mindshare from mine. Users are blocked from collaborating with me because of the proprietary software. Why should I do something that hurts me?

However, there are many times when it is beneficial to choose a less restrictive license. In fact, in my opinion you should always choose the least restrictive license that leads to your success. That's because, as you rightly point out, less restrictions lead to a lower barrier of entry. And a lower barrier of entry leads to more contribution.

So choosing the correct license is always a matter of strategy. Sometimes you make the right choice and sometimes you make a mistake. The GPL has hit a good balance for many people in many situations. It brings them the return on investment that they are looking for and simultaneously allows others to benefit where they otherwise would not be able to.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[Timothy Brownawell]

The GPL keeps you from taking my code and locking it up in some proprietary application where I won't get to use it.

So the existence of these proprietary postgres-derived databases means that you don't get to use postgres because its code is now "locked up"?

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[nick.ian.k]

This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application.

No it doesn't. You (or your company) seem to be confusing copyright ownership with source code distribution. You don't relinquish copyright ownership of code you wrote by incorporating GPL'd code into your application, you're just required to make your source available if you're distributing it with the stuff you didn't write. Don't like it? Sorry, that's what the author of the code you got for and investment of $0 decided upon when they chose to distribute what they wrote --and own.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[Just Some Guy]

So the existence of these proprietary postgres-derived databases means that you don't get to use postgres because its code is now "locked up"?

No. It means that I don't get to use the modified, enhanced derivatives that are tucked away where no one can get at them. Still, that's the choice of the PostgreSQL developers. They chose a license that explicitly allowed that, as is their right. The post I replied to was complaining that GPL-using authors did not make the same choice.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[TheRaven64]

Using GPLv2, you also lose from license incompatibilities, since it's incompatible with the MPL, ASL, and CDDL (to name a few examples). One example of this that I've come across is the fact that we were unable to use PopplerKit (based on Poppler, based on xpdf, GPLv2) with LuceneKit (based on Apache Lucene, ASL), meaning we can't add full-text indexing to a PDF viewer without either replacing the PDF renderer or replacing the full-text indexer.

This is why I prefer MIT or BSD licenses for my own work. I don't lose if other people take the code and don't give anything back, but I do win if they take the code and contribute improvements (or even bug reports) back, and these licenses maximise the number of people who can do this without legal problems.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[ehartwell]

>> You don't relinquish copyright ownership of code you wrote by incorporating GPL'd code into your application, you're just required to make your source available.

You're right. The company still keeps full copyright ownership of the proprietary code. What I should have said is that the company also loses control over millions of dollars worth of R&D that went into developing the rest of the application, and, by publishing it, loses any competitive advantage it may have had.

That, of course, is the intent of the GPL: Any application that uses GPL-licensed code must release all its secrets to the community. GPL believes that information wants to be free.

>>Don't like it? Sorry, that's what the author of the code you got for and investment of $0 decided upon when they chose to distribute what they wrote --and own.

Yes, of course. But the original question is whether it's good for business to subsidize OSS. My business would love to subsidize OSS projects and share the result with the world (2 weeks @ $100/hour = $7,000). We're happy giving the results of that work back to the community.

What my company can't afford to do is donate everything else as well (2 years x 5 people x $100/hour = more than you like). The whole point of running a software business is to make back the money you spent developing the software, plus a little more.

Many people that say, "information wants to be free" really mean that information should be free to them. If you really believe everything should be free, how about freeing up your credit card information? I'm sure lots of people would love to share with you.

Re:Yes, but ... GPL

[nick.ian.k]

You're right. The company still keeps full copyright ownership of the proprietary code. What I should have said is that the company also loses control over millions of dollars worth of R&D that went into developing the rest of the application, and, by publishing it, loses any competitive advantage it may have had.

That's entirely dependent upon the business model. If you're looking at a traditional "we make money by selling a license and a pre-compiled binary with mysterious voodoo code contained therein", then yes, it's probably not a smart business move. But you're still the folks who own the copyright to your code. You're still the people who wrote it and thus you've got a great head start on anyone else who wants to sell services centered around customizing it -default expert status right out of the gate is an enormous competitive advantage. Same thing applies for support and consulting services.

Many people that say, "information wants to be free" really mean that information should be free to them. If you really believe everything should be free, how about freeing up your credit card information? I'm sure lots of people would love to share with you.

That's a very baseless and decidedly inapt comparison. What exactly are you getting at? All I'm seeing here is cynical disdain for a license that sounds like it doesn't suit your needs. People who GPL their code do it because they own it and that's what they choose to do with it -they perceive it to possibly be useful to others and they would rather that other people not make use of their code in a way with which they themselves disagree fundamentally. People who might look at their code as similarly useful to others but don't have the same concerns can choose a more permissive license. Nobody is forcing you to use GPL code, use the license for your code, or otherwise release your source code, but for whatever reason you sound as though the socialists are taking your front door off the hinges and giving away your personal possessions by lottery.

Seems to me the most important reason to....

[3seas]

...support open source development is that of helping to advance the technology of the human race and benefits of in all the ways it can.
And at the rate that open source can do above and beyond the false constraints of proprietary software.

See more info

The above contents at url has broken links and some outdated info but the general scope is still valid.
The paper only report "hirts_report1.0.pdf" address the failure, of autocoding to identify incompatibility inspired by closed source profit motives. Software packages are difficult to get to work together because of it.

To put it simply: proprietary software development has such incentives and financial motives to intentionally make incompatible (with other softwares) and overly constraining (use constraints) to inherently limit advancement in exchange for direct financial profit, Whereas the open source development direction is such that the benefits and profits to be had is achieved and what teh tool of software can help produce. Teh better the software the better the products that software is used to produce.

More work, more practice

[sleeponthemic]

I'm surprised nobody has yet pointed out that contributing to OSS is likely to lead to a direct increase in developer skillset.

It definitely is !

[unity100]

and let me tell you why - its basically no different than government subsidizing industries that are desperately needed by countries.

and in open source, you dont want to supply a constant subsidy either, there are other sources also donating to that project. so its like an installment plan.

you basically encourage and contribute to the development of a software you need or you probably will need.

its democracy at its finest - open contribution from all. how much a software is needed by people, market, it gets donated by the people, and it gets developed. basic, simple, efficient.

Re:Why

[jmpeax]

True, but you have to admit that often the first cited benefit of many OSS projects is that they're free as in beer.

OSS developers get funding because companies think their free software benefit them

I may be overly cynical, but I would suspect that the only time a company contributes to an OSS project is when it wants some form of control over it: benevolence doesn't really come into it, nor does a subscription to Free Software ideals.

Take Apple: as closed and proprietary as Microsoft, if not more so, yet they contribute to OSS. In fact, take Microsoft, who now sponsor the Apache Software Foundation.

I suppose my point is that perhaps instead of asking whether companies should subsidise OSS, we should be asking whether OSS should want companies to subsidise it.

No surprises

[DerekLyons]

A company whose livelihood is open source proposes that other businesses should subsidize open source... That's kinda like asking the RIAA and MPAA to sponsor a study on piracy.

It's not a subsidy.

[TrashGod]

It's not a subsidy; it's paid support. Do you want to pay the person you know, or the person assigned to ignore your bug-report/feature- request. If I contribute on behalf of a client, the client doesn't have to maintain a fork. I compete on knowledge and service, not secret incantations.

Re:Why

[mysqlrocks]

Why would an OS that prides itself on being free beg for subsidies?

"The Open Road" article annoys me because it incorrectly implies that free/open source software has some sort of problem and needs subsidizing. Honestly, it's quite insulting to the free/open source software movement. IMHO, the author has hugely underestimated the strength of the free/open source software movement. It's not free/open source software that's in trouble - it's companies that rely on selling proprietary software that are in trouble.

Government is just a big user, LL IS big in France

[anon mouse-cow-aard]

Open source is really about users taken responsibility and control for mission critical applications. Government is just a big user, like a big bank, an insurance company, or film production company. They have internal needs. All organizations need to look at their internal needs and skills and contribute effectively, where it is of direct benefit to them. When the benefit is big enough, they pay someone to work on a project directly, if not, they don't. Sometimes it is only part time, and the level of expertise is only for QA, patches, and the like. That's fine!

The major Apache contributors at the outset were all firms whose survival depended on having an effective web server. The business case for working on apache was compelling for all involved. Other contributions should be similarly compelling.

The flip side of yesterday's story on Quebec sole sourcing (avoiding all responsibility of any kind, and just following 'the market'), is national funding of software distributions (taking total responsibility to the point of re-inventing the wheel) Neither approach is going to work best in the long run. Large organizations funding what they need, is just the corporate analogy of individuals scratching their itch.
blog post about that: http://csptrn.blogspot.com/2007/03/national-use-of-open-source.html

Logiciel Libre is Big in France.

In France, that's what they do, on a massive scale. Example: the French Fisc (like the US. Internal Revenue Service) replaced their almost all Oracle all the time solutions by making an RFP (Request for Proposal) with specific performance tests for a J2EE platform. All the biggies were invited (Oracle, IBM, BEA, etc...) but the fastest implementation was by a small local firm using open source tools.

reference:
http://www.cllap.qc.ca/2006/modules/wfdownloads/singlefile.php?lid=48 duh... it's in French...
They don't care if you can't read it, their in it for their own good.

The fisc saved a ton of money by doing a competitive procurement. The winning company is local, and developing expertise among people who pay taxes, and drive the economy.

Another useful initiative in France with OSS is
http://adullact.org/ where people from a bunch of different local governments work together and fund and adopt common integrations of OSS technologies for specific vertical uses. Each local government reduces their costs by partially funding the common solution. Each gets a say in requirements and functionality delivered. None is stuck shouldering the whole burden.

It is not about creating new software projects. There are thousands of those, and almost all needs can be met by integration/consultation of existing software, because, frankly, not a lot of government needs are that complicated. People just have to have a mind set that they are responsible for the technological choices they make, and get educated about long term implications.

On a given government procurement, the traditional decision is 'buy vs. build' that is an obsolete decision, it is more like 'buy vs. assemble' or 'buy vs. contribute' or 'buy vs. cultivate (local talent)' today. The costs are looked at on over the duration of a procurement, not on a life cycle basis.

For example, if you take open office, and you say it will cost 4 years to make the transition, that's true. the requirement for the functionality is not going away, so in five years, assuming the transition was taken care of, when you have to renew your MS license, ooo is going to cost close to zilch. That's when they pay back starts.

Government needs to look at things rationally over the long term. the only thing on the side of the traditional vendors is perceived level of risk and market share. As the number of adopters increases, both of those aspects are declining.

Not my decision to make...

[Richard_at_work]

Should your employer pay you for time spent on open source development?

Thats not my decision to make, my employer can do whatever they wish with what I produce as a coder (or designer, or....) as I'm producing it for them. They tell me what to do, and so long as its within my ethics ranges, I do it - if they wish to then put my work out into the wild through some open source scheme, thats entirely up to them.

Re:Not my decision to make...

[YttriumOxide]

I feel a little sorry for you actually. It sounds like you've pretty much accepted that you have no say in your workplace at all. You say that "they tell me what to do, and so long as its within my ethics ranges, I do it". I myself am just a "lowly programmer", but I get invited to every meeting to discuss the future of our projects, get to give my input, and am often listened to. If I suggest we go with an open source approach on a project, there's a good chance it'll happen (unless there's a compelling business reason from someone else why we shouldn't).

It's a good thing to be involved in your company a bit more than JUST what your employment contract says you should do.

Re:Not my decision to make...

[Richard_at_work]

On the contrary, I have significant say in my employers business - my current position allows me to work on what projects I wish, I have purchasing authority and I have decision making authority within the scope of my job.

But its still not my place to decide what my employer does with my output, so the question the summary presented is one I refuse to answer because it is not my decision to make.

Re:Not my decision to make...

[TheRaven64]

On the contrary, this is exactly the decision you are faced with. Which provides your company with the best value:

1. Purchasing proprietary software.
2. Purchasing supported Free Software.
3. Downloading Free Software and maintaining a branch in-house.
4. Downloading Free Software and submitting your changes upstream for someone else to maintain.

Without knowing the specifics of your industry, I can't tell you the answer to this, but from what you've said your company is paying you to answer it for them.

as fast as windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

But if all those beneficiaries would pool a fair price -- or 5% of a fair price -- for that code, and put it into more development .. well, I can barely imagine how fast the stack would improve.

As fast as windows probably?

That is, the company making that stack code would try to bind it with their own text editor, which they would try to bind with their own text format, and when it becomes used a lot, they would start charging more for the initial product.

And at that point (or before), they would realize that it's more profitable to invest in marketin than development, and target managers rather than techies.

Re:Why

[wrook]

I may be overly cynical, but I would suspect that the only time a company contributes to an OSS project is when it wants some form of control over it: benevolence doesn't really come into it, nor does a subscription to Free Software ideals.

I don't think you are over cynical, but I do think you are missing something. Companies contribute to OSS projects when it gives them a return on their investment. Sometime that's control. Most of the time, though, they realize that they can benefit from cooperation if the software is not part of the core service/business that they are selling.

To really understand how free and open source software works in this circumstance, you merely have to look at consortiums. These were popular with businesses long before free software came around. It's a bunch of businesses that agree to cooperate on something that is not what they are selling in order to reduce cost (or sometimes they cooperate on something that they *are* selling in order to make a standard -- take DVD technology for instance). Free software just lowers the barrier to that consortium so that *many* organizations can contribute and benefit.

A really good example of this is the OpenNETCF project. It's an implementation of the .Net framework libraries with a MIT style (I think -- it's been a while since I used it) license. Back when I was doing mobile work with .Net it was indispensable. Microsoft's own implementation just plain didn't work and my company needed code that would operate the same on both desktop and mobile platforms. So we used OpenNETCF. And we fixed bugs in a few places and submitted patches.

The key here isn't control. Hell, on Microsoft platforms (and especially in .NET) Microsoft has control. You aren't going to change that. But we needed working development libraries and MS was a bit slow to deliver (it was not a high priority for them at the time). Many, many others were in the same boat, which is why OpenNETCF got started and flourished. It just doesn't make sense to horde your improvements -- the people who you are working with aren't your competition. You can only benefit from sharing.

So while I'm sure there are still lots of companies (maybe even most companies) out there that will not share no matter what, there are enough companies out there who will share to make it viable. They understand that shared benefit is still benefit.

Having said that, I agree that most companies do not adhere to free software ideals. It is fortunate that such ideals are not necessary for free software ideas to be useful. That's what "open source" is all about -- pragmatic use of free software methods without regard to ideals. IMHO keeping the ideals in mind is also good for business (what's good for your customers can be good for you -- and free software ideals are about protecting the customer), but it's an argument that I don't think needs to be had in this context. It's enough to say that free and open source software development is completely pragmatic in many places in business. To avoid it is to cut off your nose to spite your face.

It is.

[wzzzzrd]

See, I do something 3Dish, it is open source (or will be when i revive my 5 year old sourceforge project and do the initial commit). So just gimme my paycheck.

Yes - but give an incentive

[kubitus]

If a company like M$ destroys your market - you destroy theirs by offering their product for free. As this is not legal, you support somebody else who does. Economics of supporting FOSS explained in a capitalist market! Second: I would love to see a modified GPL which limits the use of SW it covers to non-commercial use but allows companies who contribute ( according to some key/function etc..) to include it in their products/use it for their commercial purposes.

Re:Yes - but give an incentive

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

I would love to see a modified GPL which limits the use of SW it covers to non-commercial use but allows companies who contribute ( according to some key/function etc..) to include it in their products/use it for their commercial purposes.

You can do whatever you want. There's no copyright on the GPL, and you may modify it however you want. However, I would be careful about losing the concept of "free" software to some anti-corporatist ideology.

Re:Yes - but give an incentive

[TheRaven64]

There's no copyright on the GPL, and you may modify it however you want.

Not true. The text of the GPL is copyrighted, and owned by the Free Software Foundation. Derived works are expressly not allowed by the copyright notice on the license (v2 has an identical notice with a different year):

Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <http://fsf.org/>
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

I've stopped being surprised by people who comment on the GPL without having the slightest clue what it says in the license, but not even knowing the conditions for using the license is a new low even by Slashdot standards.

Re:Yes - but give an incentive

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Oh. Good to know, thanks. :)

Still, you should be able to come up with similar concepts, even if the GPL is copyright.

Re:Why

[gbjbaanb]

True, but I can think of a reason why companies would want to subsidise OSS for their own selfish needs.

Currently I use some OSS software in my company, dragging my boss kicking and screaming and recently, begrudgingly agreeing that it was a better solution!. Now, there are features I'd like to add, improvements I'd like to make, additions I'd like to implement, but I don't really have the time at work or at home to do it. Persuade my boss that we could improve the OSS software and we would have a better system for our needs, and the OSS projects I use would gain from my work.

I don't think we'd ever directly pay for improvements we'd do it ourselves, but both ways amount to the same thing - subsidised OSS software, where everyone wins.

When it makes economic sense for them

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a question weather the software is part of their value add. If the software is not part of a companies value add, but just a cost of doing business then they should look at the best option for them, open or closed. In many cases the open option will be the lower cost, best value. Buying support or paying a tech to install the software is one form of financial support. Another is paying a developer to add the functions you need to a project and releasing the code back to the world. Lower overall support cost.

The issue is most IT managers do not understand this, want to risk this. You do not get fired for buying Microsoft. We just need to keep pushing awareness outside of the programming world of the economic advantages. The IT managers might not care but the bean counters will.

different people: different motivations & rewa

[petes_PoV]

Not everyone's motivated by money. Once the basic needs have been met, some like an intellectual challenge - or to feel that they have made something, or contributed to some cause or other.

Normally, companies can't meet these different needs: and extra money doesn't help retain the kind of staff who would want to work on OSS projects. So as a cheap and efficient way of retaining people they value, why not let them work on their own projects - so long as it doesn't interfere with the business of business?

Re:Because reinventing the wheel is really expensi

[CodeBuster]

Having a large base of reliable free software is a big enough advantage for some companies that they happily underwrite its development.

It is only an advantage if you can keep your competitors from using it too; othewrise it is just a cost of doing business.

Better Question

[qb001]

How about asking the question: "Is it good for business to fund applied and theoretical research and development?"
Easy call in my mind.

Community

[wagr]

In my experience, the support works both ways. What I want, and enjoy, is the community of development.

When I need help with a particular project, say printing barcodes, the OSS community allows me to incorporate features into my code that I'd otherwise have to spend a lot of $ to get. The ability to extract source code to streamline the process for my users makes for an easier to use system.

Any code changes that I make that improve functionality or fixes bugs, I return to the project. (I guess that 2/3 of my changes are actually stripping out unneeded parts instead of putting in stuff.) I don't care that my About screen has pages of source listings. I think only one person has ever even looked at my licensing text. Only two people have ever talked to me about it, and one was my boss at work.

I benefit from the line of developers before me, and I support the developers who come after me.

If I stuck my head in a proprietary system, and only coded to add-ons I paid for, then I'm limited to what someone else decides to market. Since I support only a few users of any given program, I can't offer much $, so any company that wants to sell software won't listen to me, even if I find a reproducible bug in their applet.

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

But are you keeping your "additions/improvements" internal? If so then it means that you mooched code and improved it without giving it back to the community. That's not really in the spirit of "subsidizing OSS".

On the other hand, if you do give your "additions/improvements" back to the community, then your competitors can mooch your code for free and your company has been played for suckers.

Why I hire OSS devlopers

[dubl-u]

On a number of occasions I have hired people who actively participate in OSS projects. Here's why:

• It lets me look at their code,
• It (usually) lets me see something about how they work with others,
• Most of the people who do it are very community- or team-minded,
• It lets me know that they really like programming, and aren't just clock-punchers, and
• It gives them experience with the full product development and release cycle.

And they get bonus points if they have done the work in some area that relates to the work I'm paying them to do, even if we don't use their package. Why? Because it means they've been thinking very hard about the problem.

Re:Why

[mabhatter654]

Apache is an excellent example because it gained enough ground that to recreate it would cost any company too much money. It's far better to let the experts handle it and chip them a little money to put the system on your hardware too.

I think that OSS lends itself to the consulting business, but it's not quite there yet. Companies that get paid for results and not for software directly, like web hosts. I think that ERP systems and business software could be the next frontier if companies changed over. Everybody buys $100k+ business systems, only to toss the actual support contract 3 years in because the original company only "sells" and does not develop. So they pay small consultant firms to customize code for their business but still get beat up for license fees and support from time to time. I think it's a market primed for Open Source as nobody in business cares if the consultants use code at more than 1 customer as long as they get their updates more cheaply. There's stuff to work out, but the market is primed to be wiped out by OSS or Microsoft.

Re:The French seems to be leading the US these day

[Anonymous Coward]

And eating snails.

Sounds like 'la la land'

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's say I'm running Company A, and I compete with Companies B and C. If I subsidize an OSS project (rather than paying external or internal devs for a private custom solution that might give me a competitive advantage), what's to stop Companies B and C from using the OSS code that I funded, for free?

Or the reverse: If Companies B and/or C are willing to subsidize an OSS project, why should I subsidize when I can mooch that code for free myself? I'd be more than happy to let my competitors fund code that I then can use for free.

As time goes on, more and more companies would wise up and realize that funding OSS code let's their competitors mooch that code for free, and more and more companies will stop subsidizing since they're being played as suckers.

I know OSS advocates hate comparisons with communism, but communism failed because there's no incentive to do anything when everything you do, others mooch for free and vice-versa. Productivity goes down the toilet.

When's that last time OSS folk actually invented something? IBM or Google tweaking Linux or Apache and giving those tweaks back to the community is baby shit. Let's see Google release their search algorithm code so that Yahoo, MS, Ask, etc can use it for free, then I'll be convinced that subisdizing OSS is worthwhile.

Re:Sounds like 'la la land'

[Timothy Brownawell]

Let's say I'm running Company A, and I compete with Companies B and C. If I subsidize an OSS project (rather than paying external or internal devs for a private custom solution that might give me a competitive advantage), what's to stop Companies B and C from using the OSS code that I funded, for free?

Maybe they don't know about it, maybe they're not set up properly to use it effectively, maybe they've already bought in to a competing solution.

Or the reverse: If Companies B and/or C are willing to subsidize an OSS project, why should I subsidize when I can mooch that code for free myself? I'd be more than happy to let my competitors fund code that I then can use for free.

Maybe you want faster development, or maybe you want slightly different features than what your competitors are going for.

As time goes on, more and more companies would wise up and realize that funding OSS code let's their competitors mooch that code for free, and more and more companies will stop subsidizing since they're being played as suckers.

You're not automatically a "sucker" just because you happen to be creating positive externalities. I doubt that a lumber mill would much care who else used benefited from the software they helped fund for their HR department to use, unless the wider use actually benefited them by, say, getting bugs found/fixed quicker.

When's that last time OSS folk actually invented something? IBM or Google tweaking Linux or Apache and giving those tweaks back to the community is baby shit. Let's see Google release their search algorithm code so that Yahoo, MS, Ask, etc can use it for free, then I'll be convinced that subisdizing OSS is worthwhile.

A lot of the work on distributed/decentralized source control (Darcs patch theory, (deterministic) mark-merge, etc). FastCGI. Anything described in the RFCs. Plan 9 and Inferno. Package management. etc...

Re:Sounds like 'la la land'

[cycoj]

I wish some people, especially business people, would study more game theory. They would realize that in most situations corporation is more advantageous than confrontation. In the case that you describe if there are several competitors it is better for them to work together on those solutions than to keep them closed. I doubt that leaching is really that advantageous either because you have absolutely no influence on the code so you probably still have to adjust some of it to your needs.

Re:Why

[Zero__Kelvin]

A better question would be:

Why would a person who doesn't know what a homograph is post absurd rhetorical questions on Slashdot?

Of course, almost any other question would have been better, so it's not like I had to jump very high to clear the bar.

Re:Because reinventing the wheel is really expensi

[Gazzonyx]

Unless your competitors use it and have their own changes that they want to make and push up stream, which benefits you as well as them. Everyone is scratching itches, and most of us have overlapping itches and not enough fingers to scratch with.

By keeping the code a trade secret

[Anonymous Coward]

That's how you lock up code.

Your "real question" is already settled. If you want to use MS SDK's you have to pay a developer. You cannot profit from the SDK without giving money back to microsoft.

You're hardly warmbait, never mind flamebait.

Re:By keeping the code a trade secret

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

We were actually talking about code that was previously free, but somehow is now not. You can't copyright free code again to stop it circulating, and you can hardly call it a trade secret when it has been circulating the net for some time (not to mention the copyright belongs to someone else).

You're hardly warmbait, never mind flamebait.

Maybe that might tell you that I'm not actually posting a flamebait? No? I guess my name means that all my posts are automatic attempts at flamebait, huh. As for you, your obvious attempt at being cowardly has failed miserably.

You can't use the derivative

[Anonymous Coward]

What point would there be to have the source code for SysV R1? What if all further changes were propriatory. How much good would that code you still have access do for you? No NUMA, no modular drivers, no SMP. Memory less than 4GB and no more than 1024 processes. Oh, and Y2K incompatible.

Now, you COULD rewrite all the patches needed but that's a shitload of work and you'd be the sort of person who'd keep that to themselves anyway, meaning that the work is repeated thousands of times.

Sounds like a huge waste to me.

Yes: case study from Google / ZXing

[srowen]

I am from Google and co-operate the "zxing" open-source barcode reader project. (http://code.google.com/p/zxing) Two of us were allowed to devote most of our time for 6 months to this open project, because it made strategic sense for the business.

Why? To be brief, 2D barcodes open up new possibilities for advertising services in print. Our Print Ads business wanted to build services around them. However the market is still developing and while there are some dominant open standards evolving, there are several proprietary formats emerging. We thought it best -- both for the ecosystem but also for our business -- if the open standards won. So we explicitly set out to promote them, and one way of doing that is to release free, open, quality software that uses the open standards.

Contributing to open source can definitely be strategically valuable.

Re:Why

[linhares]

Here's something I don't get. Why do Apple and MS still have their proprietary browsers? Why not just let go off IE and Safari and use expensive engineering resources in other stuff?

I know, I know, to some extent that's exactly what Apple does with webkit. But my feeling is that, sadly, they cannot concede because of the looming threat of lunix, as in: "first, it was the browser, then, the whole desktop". So no concessions at all are made.

Re:Why

[jnnnnn]

A really good example of this is the OpenNETCF project. It's an implementation of the .Net framework libraries with a MIT style (I think -- it's been a while since I used it) license. Back when I was doing mobile work with .Net it was indispensable. Microsoft's own implementation just plain didn't work and my company needed code that would operate the same on both desktop and mobile platforms. So we used OpenNETCF. And we fixed bugs in a few places and submitted patches.

In fact, OpenNETCF is released under a "shared source" licence, the first condition of which explicitly prohibits distribution or combination with other free (both senses) software.

Actually, the whole thing reeks of Microsoft sponsorship.

To be fair, a lot of their other projects (little helper apps, debugging tools etc.) _are_ MIT licensed (they call it "true Open Source").

What goes around comes around.

[WgT2]

Sure they should: you reap what you sow.

Undermining Opponents, Complements, Corp Warfare

[StCredZero]

Open Source is now used as a weapon in corporate competition.

Why does IBM spend money to release Eclipse? To hurt Sun. (What does an Eclipse do to a Sun?) To make it more difficult for Sun to earn money off of Java. (You can commoditize something to prevent it from becoming your rival's money making product.) At the same time, the software is an economic complement to things that IBM sells. (All manner of middleware and corporate consulting, mostly the latter. A great IDE and other tools encourages more in-house corporate development. More opportunity to sell stuff like consulting and middleware.)

Re:Because reinventing the wheel is really expensi

[k8to]

It may not be an advantage compared to your direct competitors, but it may well grow your market overall.

Re:Why

[wrook]

Very interesting... I swear it was MIT licensed about 3 years ago (when I was using it). I wish I had saved a copy... In fact, I vaguely remember when 1.3 came out there was a division between OpenNETCF and OpenNETCF.com. And I also seem to remember that there were two different licenses at the time.

But if this is what happened, then it is indeed scuzzy beyond words...

Re:Why

[Anonymous Coward]

You say "control" like it was a bad thing. In the case of OSS, all this "control" means that the company gets features they want in the software. There's no reason we should resent that, when that is the whole point of OSS - the more contributors there are adding their own features, the better software we all get.

Re:Why

[TheRaven64]

If you keep your code internal, you have to maintain a branch and handle any conflicts introduced whenever anyone else touches the same bit of code as you. If you send it upstream, merging conflicts becomes someone's problem and doesn't cost you anything.

Whether letting other people use your changes will cost more or less than keeping them secret depends on your individual case.

Mods on crack.

[serviscope_minor]

How is the parent a troll? That is the whole point of the GPL.

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