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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.
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.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
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.
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.
Amnesty International
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.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
On a number of occasions I have hired people who actively participate in OSS projects. Here's why:
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.
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...
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.