Slashdot Mirror
How To Kill an Open Source Project With New Funding
mir42 writes "The OpenSource multimedia authorware project Sophie, formerly hosted by USC Los Angeles, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization, Mellon Foundation, approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal, which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Sophie. Being an OpenSource project, this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub-contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid-off developers started OpenSophie.org trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version. Have others faced similar situations? How would you deal with a situation like this?"
Is this a legit question being asked at the end of the story? Or is this whole article a thinly veiled attempt to editorialize about an event the author disagrees with in an effort to drum up community support for his/her project?
It seems like Slashdot is being used as a hammer here, instead of just the normal server-blasting time waster we all signed up for. I don't like being used.
What exactly is the problem here? The old devs don't like something about the new project(the summary isn't clear what, and there's no article with more information), so they've forked it. Who exactly killed what?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm not even sure what the question is. So the project is being taken closed source? Or it's still open source but the original developers aren't included in the new plan?
From the description, it sounds like a fork is getting all the monetary attention - not unheard of.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I dunno what the deal is... sounds completely legit to me. There's nothing in the GPL, or in F/OSS in general, that says that if you write something, someone else cannot come along with a better story, more money, more developers, etc. and take your code or even forking it out from under you and taking control of the project. They can also start selling support for it and making money off of it (even without additional development... just support it).
So you have something open source.
Someone takes it, throws money at it, and tries to do something with it.
This pisses you off, because they now have the resources to one up you on the project.
Excuse my ignorance, but I thought open source was supposed to be open and free so it would allow anyone to evaluate, use, improve upon, etc. a project, with the end result being better stuff for everyone.
If this company put up money to do something with a base they saw as promising, then they're doing exactly what open source is all about.
If your code/project is not covered by any license that forces them to keep it open source / attribute credit to you, that's your fault.
It seems to me your e-peen got butt hurt, and you're crying foul.
...might be "How To Kill an Open Source Project With A Crappy Web Site".
I took a look at OpenSophie.org, and there's nary a specific description of what the project is, no screenshot graphics, and the only documentation and examples seem to be embedded in downloadable .zip files.
I'm not saying that the project's good, or bad, or bogus, but from the website, there's nothing that makes me want to litter my hard drive with zips from an unknown, untrusted source, just to find out more.
Someone was apparently not happy with the current developers and gave the next job to someone else.
Dude, you had your chance. You blew it. By your own admission "As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow" you programmed and released shit.
What on earth is USC Los Angeles? As opposed to another USC? There's only 1, which is in Los Angeles. There's a university that's part of the University of California system called University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA. That's not USC Los Angeles either. By the way, it's USC that hosted this project.
A very similar thing happened to the Open Source video editor Jahshaka. Apparently some very dark interests were involved, because the author had to sign an NDA. Guess what happened later? The project stalled, and the author was forbidden to even talk about it in his own forums. This situation continued for more than a year, with everybody wondering how the project was doing, and why it didn't advance at all.
The peril is not the funding per-se, but the contract. When a company wants to pay you to develop your existing open source software, you need to be wary about NDAs and changes in the contract terms. ESPECIALLY if the company wants to retain the ownership of your work!
"Someone does nothing but copy the existing output and claim it's a new direction, and bamboozling the funding organization into giving them the new grant".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Someone takes it, throws money at it, and tries to do something with it.
Except according to the OP they're not taking anything, they're re-implementing it from scratch in Java using the current UI as a guide. And it's Carnegie Mellon that's putting up the money, and who were (apparently) providing support for the original project.
Now that's not unreasonable, if there were problems with the original that CM couldn't resolve... for example, if the FOSS software wasn't going anywhere and they needed something that worked (which was my first thought reading the article). And, after all, it's not like there are no FOSS projects that have done the same thing (though if they target another FOSS project rather than a commercial one you tend to get some bad blood). On the other hand, it's possible that the Bulgarians pulled an end-run around the people at CM who knew what was going on and got some PHB to pull the plug on the FOSS project.
We don't know, and it's better to avoid jumping to conclusions... either that Sophie was stabbed in the back by the Bulgarians, or that Sophie was adrift at sea and the Bulgarians rescued it... without more information.
It's not illegal. You obviously think your project is better than theirs, so act like it. I suggest you spend less time whining that someone "stole" your idea (if you wanted to keep it, why did you make it Open anyhow?) and more time writing good software .
Whichever software is truly more useful to people will get used, and people will hear about it.
Grow a pair and get to work.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
It sounds like a hostile takeover where the community had no power and their duties were simply outsourced by the player holding all the cards.
For any given open source project, there's some kind of answer to the question of "who owns this thing?". When choosing a particular FOSS product as a key component of a project, you have to be aware of not only the quality of the software but the issues of its community politics.
There is baggage with commercial products also, but it's a different set of equations. (Like, if I rely on the product will they jack up the licensing fee, and is this company too small or too big to give my account the attention it needs, etc.)
First off, wtf is Sophie? Their page says it is "software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment" and I am still as clueless as before? What does it do? I tried reading their user manual and gave up. It is utterly unclear. As best I can figure, they were making some sort of bastardized office suite. If so, why? Isn;t there enough of that already?
As for the question in the summary, what is their license? Both for the original project and for what this company is developing. Just saying open source is not enough when you are dealing with a fork.
That's about the fastest way to kill a project, yes.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Let's subsitute another better known entity as an example.
"The OpenSource office project OpenOffice, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization Sun approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Open Office. (Having contributed nothing new.) Being an OpenSource project this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid off, developers started FreedomOffice.info trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version."
Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Wait, I know how to solve the problem! The original authors should have claimed exclusive copyrights to the source code and distributed only binaries. Maybe they could even file for a patent on some of their methods.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Carnegie Mellon donates moeny for Sophie development. Four years later, it's slow and buggy. Carnegie Mellon donates money to bulgarian group to rewrite Sophie in Java.
What's the problem, exactly?
Oh, and for an example of a similar situation (this time with software that's known), consider the Emacs/XEmacs split. Emacs development was slow, so Lucid paid their employees to work on it and contracted with one of the main Emacs developers (Joe?). RMS didn't like the direction it was taking, the copyright not being assigned to FSF, etc.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
hi,
:) jahshaka (http://jahshaka.org/) was a open source digital content creation tool for film/video released at the start of the online video revolution. We had great hopes and we were pretty hot with 40-50k downloads a month and a active community. we won a few awards (best graphics software of the year) and intel contacted us saying they wanted to help out.
i feel your pain! funding killed my project... and herein lies my story
One thing led to another and with intels help we got £4 million from a tier-1 vc in the UK, under the terms that i move to the UK to be cheif evangleist (?). Sounds great right? Well for the first year 75% the funding went into the hands of upper management and their consultants (since upper management were clueless to open source).
Then they close-sourced the project, so with the communities help we tried to wage a war against management to 'open their eyes' and i ended up getting sacked for it - and left stuck in london with my family, wife and kids. And london aint cheap.
After the 2nd year (with no progress at-all, no new releases, and a failed attempt at build a CMS which was nothing to do with our project) eventually i was hired back as a consultant.
I immediatly directed as much of the budget as possible (turned out to be around 2 mil us) into building a fork of the underlying engine in the original project, called the openlibraries, under the LGPL. i took a back seat and directed this while i watched another CEO proceed to build a online video distribution system with the rest of our cash (also nothing to do with our project but whatever) with a goal of eventually getting my stuff back.
In the end i was able to use my consulting fees to buy it all back... for around £50k... only to find out that i had wasted 4 years of my life and was back to where i was when i got the funding. I got some cool tech out of the deal and some cool domains (http://plugin.com/) but it has then taken me the better half of this year to figure out how to get the project back off the ground.
so, if nothing at all, you can learn from mmy experiences. open source is not about money its about the people. if you want to build a comercial business then you need to make up your mind from the start.
hope this helps,
Jah Shaka http://www.jahshaka.org/
They're paying to have a project that doesn't work well enough (by your own admission) rewritten completely so that it -will- work. Sounds to me like they're trying to save it.
If you want to prove yourselves, take the time to fix the current one before they have had time to completely rewrite it... If you can't, there's your real problem.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy.
But from what I can gather from the summary, the whole point of the grant was
to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java.
So in theory it's primarily a language swap, and the features and GUI shouldn't change much. Basically, I think the screenshotting is actually valid in this case, and honestly should be the guide for the new work.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I think the summary said they were rewriting it in Java, which is bad enough. I don't know what it was written in, but if rewriting it in Java can be passed as an improvement, I am afraid to find out.
Maybe the original developers don't like Java. I certainly don't.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
situation like this?
Why, of course, it would be .... Sophie's Choice... hehehe
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
As Dean of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the Principal Investigator on the original Sophie grant, I'd like to share my own perspectives on what's happening with Sophie.
Sophie 1.0 was and is a collaboration between our School and the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF:Book). Sophie is intended to make it easier for anyone who is interested in authoring rich-media ebooks to be able to produce professional quality output with minimal training. Bob Stein, head of IF:Book and before that the founder of the Voyager multimedia company, is Sophie's visionary, and a longtime colleague and friend. Bob and I approached Mellon (note: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Program in Research in Information Technology, not Carnegie Mellon, as someone suggested) for funding because Sophie's core constituency is also their core constituency: people in higher education institutions, libraries, museums, arts organizations, and wildlife organizations who want to author interactive content that makes extensive use of text, images, audio, and video. Mellon supported the project on the same terms as all software projects it supports; namely, that the software must be offered under an open source license, and that we must work to develop a sustaining, open source community for Sophie as part of our responsibilities.
Sophie 1.0 is written in Squeak, a Smalltalk variant. It implements Bob's vision, does what was promised to Mellon, and does it well. As a 1.0 product, there is still plenty of room for enhancement, and we had always intended to approach Mellon for additional funding for version 2.0. Unfortunately, despite a lot of interest among individual faculty and a few small programs, the widespread institutional adoption necessary to form a viable Sophie 1.0 sustaining community was not happening - due in large part, our inquiries suggested, to lack of interest in supporting an enterprise software application written in Squeak. In the community whose support was most essential to Sophie's survival, everyone wanted a language that was more widely known and used; the largest single group of potential adopters wanted Java
There's a long story about how it happened, but the short version is that IF:Book and USC asked one of the contractors that had helped write Sophie 1.0 - a Bulgarian firm called Axa Solutions - to write Sophie 2.0 in Java, so that it could be adopted widely enough to become a self-sustaining, community-supported open source project. Sharing our concerns about adoption, and continuing to believe in the project, Mellon enthusiastically supported our decision by making a grant for version 2.0 in Java. Sophie 2.0 is not just a Java rewrite of version 1.0: it is a true version 2, containing all the lessons learned in version 1 and substantially extending the functionality, which merely happens to be written in a different programming language.
Let me correct some inaccuracies in the comments I have read so far. No, I don't consider what we're doing to be forking the project, any more than any version 2 is a fork of version 1: Sophie 2.0 will even feature backward compatibility with Sophie 1.0 books (as well as an improved file-format, one of the lessons learned from Sophie 1.0). Yes, our solution uses a Bulgarian firm, Axa Solutions, as a contractor, but that is not as much of a change as it has been made to sound; as I mentioned, the Bulgarians were part of 1.0 development as well. No, the Bulgarian firm is not closing the code: they don't own the IP, we do, and we have signed a contract with Mellon to make Sophie available under an approved open source license. No, this is not a commercial undertaking in any sense: this is two not-for-profit organizations developing open source software with the help of a charitable foundation, to be sustained by an open source community of not-for-profit user-institutions like colleges, museums, and theaters. Apart from Axa Solutions, which is a contractor to us in the same way the rest of the original Squeak coders were contractors to us (including, I assume
Because 90% of developers understand Java, and maybe 10% understand SmallTalk. TIOBE lists SmallTalk as #36 in popularity with 0.123% market share and Java as #1 with over 20%.
Granted, TIOBE is based on search engine results, which aren't a perfect indicator of usage, but they are probably accurate to the order of magnitude.
{
public void speak()
{System.out.println("Hello World");}
public static void main()
{
HelloWorld helloWorld = new HelloWorld();
helloWorld.speak();
}
}
Haven't bothered to compile that, but it's close enough for 4:30AM. If I wanted to be a pain I'm sure I could shave off a line or two. Anyways, what is your beef with Java? I've found most people that diss on Java fall in to one of the following categories:
For my own part, I program in C/C++, Java, perl, a bit of .NET, V(B/C)-6, and ADA is my guilty pleasure language (arguably the most well designed and implemented of the bunch, IMHO). If memory footprint and load time aren't an issue and I need to go cross platform, Java is just my only option. In the languages that I know, Java is second only to ADA when it comes to concurrency (I admit I've never done anything with multithreading in .NET, but I'm sure it's fairly close to Java in both design and implementation). So, what's your beef with Java?
.NET/Ruby developer and are therefore sworn enemies to Java developers ;)
Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not judging you by the fact that you don't like Java. I also completely understand simply not liking a language; I've just found that many times when someone starts talking about why they don't like Java, they don't really have a reason other than it's 'cool' to diss on Java. Or they're a
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.