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How Long Should an Open Source Project Support Users?
Ubuntu Kitten writes "Since October the community-generated database of cards known to work with Ndiswrapper has been down. This is apparently due to an on-going site redesign, but right now the usual URL simply directs to a stock Sourceforge page. Without the database, the software's usability is severely diminished but this raises an interesting question: Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users? If so, for how long should the support last? Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites. While developers can sometimes find sponsorship, is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?"
It seems you are looking for a list of cards supported by Ndiswrapper, nothing else? Is the software development not keeping up with cards or something? I'm more concerned that I can no longer access their wiki. I'm not sure how the lack of a database of cards it works with would cause its functionality to "diminish" but you are right that this raises an interesting question.
Without the database, the software's usability is severely diminished but this raises an interesting question: Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users? If so, for how long should the support last?
No. Although from time to time I notice that Maven2's repo1 is sometimes down which irks me a bit when I'm using new packages. And that's why I have a local repository on my list--in case the bandwidth I steal from Jason van Zyl of Codehaus ever dries up. And if it should, I realize there's not a lot I can do about it ... although I can always keep downloading packages (or even building them myself) and installing them on my local network albeit tedious. I am lucky though as Maven2 is well thought out in this respect, always defaulting through a whole list of repos (indeed if repo1 went down, there are others).
I appreciate Mr. van Zyl's work and efforts but he and I have signed no prior contract guaranteeing the length of time his service should be available to me. And I, of course, expect nothing from him. He's doing me a great service at the moment but the service--though rarely spotty--doesn't have to last past this second.
Say, where's your local repository of Ndiswrapper's database?
Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites.
This is correct. And by that logic, it may benefit you to send the sourceforge developers a simple message asking them if a modest donation of funds could ail this predicament? Every so often I anonymously throw $10-$20 at a project that I use heavily, I really wish others would do the same.
While developers can sometimes find sponsorship, is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?
I'm really not sure although I do realize that if Ndiswrapper is talking to this database on the backend, there's probably no eyeballs looking at ads to the left and right of this database. Which makes it kind of hard for magical ad revenue to come in (similar to the codehaus repo1 scenario listed above). I think you'd be better off appealing to some distribution that may hinge heavily on Ndiswrapper but I'm pretty sure the developers would have exhausted these resources before letting this site lapse into oblivion.
My work here is dung.
As long as its users support it, duh.
No, an open source project is not obliged to provide support for its users. They're giving you the software (and sometimes documentation) for free. They weren't even required to do that (even if you use GPL components you can keep your modifications to yourself as long as you don't go handing out binaries to the rest of the world).
The people responsible for the project have absolutely zero obligation to help you with anything. If they want to help, good for them (and you). If not, you have the source - read through that to figure out what it does. Or pay somebody else to do that for you.
There are companies that provide support for open source software, but unless you're paying them for it, they have no obligation to help you.
When your beer is free, someone still paid for it.
:P
The difference between purchasing software and choosing whether or not to donate to a F/OSS organization is that you choose how much the software (or service) is worth to you, should you actually decide to pay for it.
Disclaimer: I'm a huge advocate of F/OSS, just not Linux... I honestly wish my interests aligned with reality
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Ugh. People who take down the existing page because they're redesigning the site.
Generally you only see this mistake from 14-year-old "web developers" whose qualifications all come from adding animated GIF background images to MySpace profiles. Of course, these "web developers" always severely doubt the amount of time it'll take to finish the page and put it back online, so "check back in a couple days" typically turns into months, years, or "kiss that page goodbye, sucker!" Saying the term "staging server" to these type of people will usually garner the response: "caging what? I was too busy picking my nose to listen."
If you're lucky, it was actually a hostile admin pulling down the site and holding it hostage to the project for (pinky-in-mouth) one-hundred-billion-dollars! and they didn't just recruit an incompetent idiot to run it. In the former case, at least the pages will come back once the FBI breaks down his door and holds an assault rifle to his head, in the latter case they'll be "under construction" until the end of time.
So, uh, yeah. The question here isn't "how should open source projects support users?" But more along the lines of, "should open source projects do intensely retarded things with their websites?" (The answer is no.)
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Exactly. If you want support from an open source project, you need to help that project out. Whether that's in the form of development work, testing, documentation writing, helping uses in the forums or lists out, or good old fashioned cash depends on what the project needs. Most projects are more than happy to list what they need, and if they don't, e-mail the project's lead(s) or e-mail their support list -- they'll be very happy to hear from you.
You get out of it what you put into it. Like anything else in life.
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One of the hazards of the trade is that some software may cease to be supported. This goes double for OSS, where the developers are often unpaid.
I think your premise is faulty. It has been my experience that commercial products become unsupported far faster than open source projects. Of course, with all aggregate generalizations there are specific instances that counter the general trend, but I think it is safe to say that you are safer banking on open source support than you are commercial support for a few reasons:
(1) As mentioned, generally speaking, support is longer term with open source.
(2) Unlike proprietary solutions, the code is generally available, it is less likely that a useful project will ever *really* become unsupported.
(3) If it is a marginal project, you have the source, you can pay someone to support you.
You should read any open source license, a project does not have to support you at all and I think that it's kind of selfish that you expect it.
"Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users?"
Of course not. If I give you a car, are you going to expect me to change the oil in it every time its due? Sure, people that spend their time developing software for free may be inclined to help you out to an extent, but they don't owe you anything.
Take the issue I found in Pidgin. It was crashing seemingly randomly, and debugging showed it had something to do with playing sounds. I opened a ticket, someone marked it as an actual defect, and 14 days later, since no one had looked at the ticket again, it automatically closed. Annoying, but I still have a Windows XP disc laying around somewhere (for which there are a number of IM clients that run just fine for me).
Whale
Unfortunately this can only run so far. If you're a business and you've spent 100 hours installing a piece of software across a network only to find updates and support drops a week later, that can work out to be very expensive.
Likewise if you're a student and a paper is due but you can't complete it due to a bug/error and the support section for the program you've used no longer exists, it's a big issue.
This is even more of a problem if there is a leading OSS solution that is so well known, no one wants to write competing software for it so when development and support stops, there's a gaping vaccuum in that area.
Open Source has to compete with commercial software and usually commercial companies will give you support for the lifespan of a product or until it becomes obsolete (not always, companies go bust, get taken over etc.). It's no good software being free if lack of support means you waste a fortune on wages trying to fix issues.
Two possible solutions: OSS developers give in and run ads on their sites (it's not hard to find unobstrusive ads with acceptable rates nowadays) or owners of sites are given incentives to hand over control of their sites to a central OSS archive where you can at least get snapshots of support forums and wikis, as well as the downloads and source.
If there are people depending on your software, then you've made a commitment.
No. THEY'VE made a commitment.
Not exactly. Here's some examples where a non-technical user might help out, even if it's not in the form of cash:
I have a couple of open source projects that are sorely in need of translators. I don't speak any languages other than English, and a little bit of very broken French and Spanish. If someone wants to provide me good translations of UI strings, help bubbles, messages, dialogs, etc., in their native tongue I'll gladly add good i18n and l10n support to the projects.
Neither of these projects have good end-user documentation. I need someone with good technical writing skills to write the user docs for them. You don't need to any programming, just how to use the program.
Evangelism: one project has existed for two years now, and the other is just about to have its first release. I need people to help get the word out about the projects.
You see what I mean? You don't need to be a programmer to help an OSS project. You just need to care.
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I run a free online game. So I'm also on the "provider" side. My take is this:
What I provide free of charge is a present and should be taken as such, i.e. no obligations. On the other hand, I'm a responsible person and my players can count on me not simply pulling the plug one day without prior announcement and saying "party's over, go home".
So how do you answer the "how long" question? You can't. As long as I want to, the stuff I provide will be available, be it my game, my website with its papers, mirrors, etc. - and if I don't want to anymore, I'll be responsible in shutting it down with enough time and ahead warning.
But if you as a user rely on a free service, then you must take into account that it could go away any minute. If your business or your happiness depends on it, make sure you can launch a local copy.
I don't think any free (as in beer) project, Open Source or not, has any obligations to provide support at all, much less for any specific period of time. The people behind it, however, probably want a good reputation, and providing support and not going away suddenly is part of that.
It's a lot of soft factors, and that's why all things considered, I'd say the question isn't adequate.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
When an open source project is first released, there is rarely any talk of cost. In fact the reason businesses go with open source is because the cost is lower. Now you're saying that there is a cost, and potentially a huge one. The difference being that in open source you don't know the cost until after you've been using the software. I know we joke about "the first one is always free", but is that really the sort of business model that we want? The same business model used by drug dealers and payday loans?
And before you bring out the tired old argument that the sopurce is available, you can just hire somebody, think about how much that costs. Maintaining software is expensive. Very expensive. Forking your own version of a major open source project would cost in the millions of a dollars per year. It's ludicrous to expect any commercial enterprise to do that.
Given your and many other arguments regarding lack of support for OSS, I would have to say that OSS is still far too risky for any commercial uptake. Commercial software is still the better way to go. Enterprises that have critical systems depending on OSS really need to rethink their strategies if there is such a big risk that a key component of their systems will just evaporate overnight.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
Is it really? I sometimes wonder. The marque projects of open source - OpenOffice.org and Firefox, for example - look corporate to my eyes. The Dirac video codec emerged from the BBC, and you can't get more high church than that.
No, other people deciding to depend on my software does not create a commitment on my part.
It would be more correct to say, if someone decides to depend on my software without first securing a commitment from me (or from a third party capable of providing support based on the source code), that someone probably isn't a very good business-person.
So, if an individual project wants to be commercially viable, that project would be wise to think about a support model that offers its business users some assurances; but the answer to the general question "is an OSS project obligated to provide support" is still no.
And how much does this cost?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: anybody who says that a business can just hire someone to work on open source software if it becomes unsupported does not understand the first thing about the nature of business.
Why doesn't Slashdot ever get slashdotted?
http://web.archive.org/web/20080113194857/ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/index.php?/component/option,com_openwiki/Itemid,33/id,list/
This has nothing to do with Open Source. The question should be "Should projects that give software away for free be obligated to provide support?"
There is plenty of closed source software that can be downloaded for free. There is plenty of open source software that can be purchased with support.
The answer, by the way, is no. Just because software is free does not mean that the makes of it are obliged to give you support. Support costs money. Businesses who use software (open or closed source) pay for support, either through a support vendor or in house talent.
Ask Slashdot: Where bad ideas meet poor googling skills.
You say, somewhere above in the thread, that people adopt open source because of cost. I don't think this is the case. I think they adopt if because of quality and value. I think this is the case for all software (That is, when using a computer saves $15,000 over not using a computer, $1,000 or even $10,000 of licensing costs will not impede the decision). So projects like the Linux kernel, Apache, Perl, Python, etc., are adopted because they deliver a great deal of value, not simply because they are cheaper than the alternatives.
In that context, OSS is a development model, not a cost model, and any decision to use software is going to include examination of the quality of the software and the quality of the support available for the software, and so on. Grouping software by the license it happens to be available under is a false argument (because no one would buy proprietary software that came with shitty support).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I'm not 100% sure what "marque" means but I would suggest that gcc is the marque project of open source and has been for about 20 years.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
And how much does this cost?
Depends. When you rely completely on proprietary software that suddenly becomes unsupported, switching can become very expensive. When it's Open Source, switching is a lot less expensive, since the software isn't a black box. And in fact, it may not even be necessary to switch, because someone else can take over support of the software.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: anybody who says that a business can just hire someone to work on open source software if it becomes unsupported does not understand the first thing about the nature of business.
It's a lot easier than hiring someone to work on proprietary software that isn't yours.
OSS provides fallback solutions that proprietary software simply doesn't.
I used to help out via entering bug reports for bugs I found. Invariably, the bug report would either get a gruff, unhelpful reply (like: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1865630&group_id=95717&atid=612382 ), or it would simply be ignored for months and months until the project either closed it due to inactivity or switching bug trackers (like this ex-bug: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1609779&group_id=93438&atid=604306 ).
I don't bother anymore.
Comment of the year
encourage more people to donate
I think, in all honesty, that is a wet dream. While I am a "Free Software," not just open source, developer I am neither a socialist nor a communist. In over 12 years of doing it and, at times, very actively contributing, I have *never* gotten a donation. At one point I had over a thousand users. It just isn't going to happen. Unless you have a *big* project that a lot of "big" companies use, you ain't making money off it. (As per my original qualification that any aggregate generalized trend will have a few exceptions)
I am a capitalist with a sense of social responsibility. I write what I need, share it if it does not harm my business to do so. I do this as a way to "give back" to the free software environment that enriches me. I have come to expect nothing more from it. If, per chance, I develop something that snowballs and makes me rich, whoo hoo! but I won't bank on it.