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Red Hat's Max Spevack On Defending Linux Freedom
TRNick writes "How can developers who are working for free protect themselves and avoid getting exploited by business users of Linux? TechRadar has an interview with former Fedora project leader Max Spevack to find out how his new role as manager of the community architecture team is designed to help. Quoting: 'About two-thirds of the Fedora packages are maintained by community people, and if we didn't have that community, that chunk of work would either not get done, which would significantly harm Red Hat's entire value, or would have to made up by more [paid] engineers. The challenge on the flip side of that is to make sure that everyone in the Fedora community feels valued, that everyone who contributes can be proud of the way that Red Hat uses their code.'"
Look! Max Spevack's initials are MS! He obviously secretly works for Microsoft! Spy! Spy!
After all, in the past you'd get paid top dollar for the kind of stuff that you can now download for free and businesses use that in order to gain a competitive edge
Case in point: google. They use open source software to drive their whole business, are valued in the tens of billions and give back a pittance of that to the open source community (ok, they do a good PR job so it looks like it is a lot more but it really is but a small fraction of their take).
It has come to the point where if you are 16 or 17 and wondering what career to follow computational biology looks like a *much* better path than IT, and besides it has less risk of being outsourced.
The Cathedral had its shortcomings, but so does the bazaar.
MP3 Search Engine
The challenge on the flip side of that is to make sure that everyone in the Fedora community feels valued, that everyone who contributes can be proud of the way that Red Hat uses their code.
Between the lines:
My job is to keep the community motivated without having to pay them. Wall Street wet themselves during our IPO when they found out that much of our development staff was working for free. If we loose that, our stock price will tank further and those of us who made it really big by exploiting the free labor ourselves stand to lose out big.
Go ahead, mod it Troll. I just wanted to let your folks know what the real score is.
This this this, a thousand times this.
I am actually prohibited from using GPL software at work for this very reason. Not because we might unknowingly violate someone's license, but because of the negative PR if we make "too much" money without giving "enough" back to the community. We're running a web-based service on a razor-thin margin, we can't afford the risk.
Even though a six month cycle seems brutal (Max's own words)it does permit a developer to finish and even polish his/her code because the next release in 6 months is just not that long of time span to wait.
I shudder at the code I have seen in other distros that was not quite ready but had to be included because the next release would not be for a another year or longer so we have to go with what we got now... regardless!
Fedora and its community members should be congratulated for their work in the Linux arena.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
RedHat has to walk a fine line. They spend a lot of money developing a solid distro and want to make money supporting it for business use. Centos takes their work and gives it away for free. Obviously legal under the GPL but doesn't seem very fair to me.
Ever since the libertarian/OSI contingent tried hijacking OSS, the constant cry from the Linux community has been "exploit me!"
...free standards are what's going to make it work. Free standards make machines talk to each other. Free software allows us to see what they're saying. There seems to be a lot of debate about the source of the code. But the source of the code isn't going to matter much if the standards are abused. Why isn't anyone talking much about this? Flash made a huge landgrab with their proprietary software - look, I tried Gnash on YouTube and that site whines about it - yet few are willing to take youtube to task for not being compatible with gnash. And that is just one example. So companies can say that they're contributing to open source projects. Great. But what about the standards they use?
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
"The challenge on the flip side of that is to make sure that everyone in the Fedora community feels valued"
FAIL
Same where I work.
Our managers quickly went from:
1. We're not touching crap that is just sitting out on the Net to download
2. Ok, other companies are using these packages, I guess we can too
3. Holy shit! Get this GPL crap out of our company after reading companies suffering under "Possible GPL violation at company XXX!!!" or diatribes about how such and such company isn't following the spirit of the GPL
Luckily there isn't much GPL only software that doesn't have non-viral and free BSD/Apache style licenses.
'...About two-thirds of the Fedora packages are maintained by community people, and if we didn't have that community, that chunk of work would either not get done, which would significantly harm Red Hat's entire value, or would have to made up by more [paid] engineers...'
I wonder what the community has been up to to-date after having abandoned Red Hat years ago because of RPM hell.
I understand RPM and the tools that manage it are a lot better than what they used to be in the years gone by.
Question: Does Red Hat now ship code that just works of am I out of luck when I visit flash rich sites like http://youtube.com/ and java rich sites like http://games.yahoo.com/.
.
The better question for Red Hat might be "How many developers can continue to work for free in the present economic climate?"
Expecting volunteers to carry 2/3 of the load for Fedora seems a bit much.
Are you saying your web-based service, assuming it is a for-profit organization, cannot afford to contribute USD100.00 per month to the project and/or developers that created the tools being used by your organization?
We can and would do that, but the problem is, in the eyes of certain highly published members of the community, that is Not Enough, and they will write diatribes about our perceived failures to adhere to the "spirit" of the Open Source Movement. We intend to take GPL software and modify it to run our businesses, and we can make donations to the projects and/or authors involved. But we cannot afford to make the whole of our modifications and give them to the community. We aren't planning to distribute any of our work - Any of our modifications would be purely relevant to our business. Anything anyone else could use we would contribute back. What we are doing is taking an expensive government dataset and storing said dataset in a searchable database so it can be accessed in a more sane manner. Our modifications are related to the updating and maintenance of this reformatted dataset. We intend to update it more frequently than the government does. (Quarterly vs. whenever-we-get-around-to-it) If we made our method and tools public, someone else would just take them overseas where the labor is cheaper (India, etc.) and set up an operation doing the same thing we do but with a price set below ours. I will have just worked myself out of a job. Unfortunately for me, this is the SPIRIT of the Open Source Movement: All code should be free for use and modification, no matter how damaging that is to whoever wrote it. No amount of donations will cover the fact that we aren't doing that, and so those members of the community will never be satisfied with us.
Yes, but that won't get you any bread on the table now, will it ?
In it self : No. But...
A. in the long it leaves you more money to spend on bread as you won't have to spend it on opensource stuff. Programming used to be a job reserved to an elite which had access to the proper (and expensive) tools. Nowadays, hack together some mid-range machine for a couple of hundred bucks, slap your favorite Linux distribution for free, and voilà you have all the tools you need to code.
B. working on opensource projects both trains your skill (in coding, but also in other useful project managing skills) and increases your portfolio with examples of projects to show to potential future employers. As they are F/LOSS instead of NDA-covered, you can freely demo them and even show a quick tour around the code(*).
Thanks to F/LOSS development, during interview you're not anymore trying to persuade your future employer that you could be a good developer if you got hired, you're showing them your past projects to persuade them that you've been indeed good and that they need to hire you.
F/LOSS projects put an end in the eternal catch-22 problem of employers wanting people with lots of practical experience behind them and people have a hard to get a first employer in order to have the opportunity to gain experience.
And then with *that* portfolio maybe you'll get hired for a pay that will bring the bread on your table :
Either working for some company on proprietary NDA'd software (if that doesn't pose any major ethical problem to you)
Or working as a paid engineer to develop F/LOSS solutions for some company (hired at a Linux developers shop, at an industry which develops its own tools for its specific niche and have no real intention on making profit on the softwares itself, etc.)
Or even, maybe your project is so good that you start getting paid to continue your so-much appreciated GPL'd project.
--
(*): I have actually been contacted and received propositions from people who saw my work on GPL'd code on projects to which we were both contributing.
Ok, I don't have a typical CS background (I have graduated in Medicine and then in Bioinformatics). But nonetheless it illustrates that because having a nice portfolio to show is important when trying to get hired, working on opensource project is good because it makes more things that you can show.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Can you give me any examples of that actually happening? Has anyone actually got significant PR for using (as opposed to distributing) GPL software and not giving enough back?
As for the GP, I can think of lots of GPL violations that have been reported on Slashdot and various news sites, but all of them have been actual violations of the license, not of its spirit.
Flash made a huge landgrab with their proprietary software - look, I tried Gnash on YouTube and that site whines about it - yet few are willing to take youtube to task for not being compatible with gnash.
Specially given that now Youtube is part of the Google familly, that Google has always immensely gained from opensource and that they have often been ready to spend some coins helping opensource projects (FireFox comes to mind), we have to persuade Google to start supporting the gnash developer's effort.
And this should make sense as it would give them more support for their own web product (the same way supporting Firefox for their web product made sens).
Gnash could open more easily a market of cheap Asian no-name device that have the ability to browse youtube, without relying on complex re-implementation (like the flash-less player on the iPhone).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
How can developers who are working for free protect themselves and avoid getting exploited by business users of Linux?
Lets see probably 85%+ of all hosting companies around the world that use Linux as hosting packages to make money off probably don't give back to the community in any way other than using their warez.
Now question; how do you or the develoeprs working on these projects define exploited?
You don't have to release the code for everything you write with the GPL. Only if you distribute it outside of your company.
The GPL stipulates that if you release a binary, you must also release the source.
So long as you don't distribute the binary (or the source in your case) you're okay.
I don't recall anyone ever getting flack for not publishing internal improvements to OSS. Hell, why would it be anybody's business what changes you make for your own use? Would you have to advertise on your homepage?
I was thinking "I'll just check Slashdot and see what's new today" and all of a sudden I saw my name on the front page. I thought "what on earth am I doing on the front page of Slashdot? I haven't given an interview in quite a long time."
I realized that the interview was from Linux Format UK (at the end of the article), and checking my records, I can see that it a summary of an interview I gave at LUG Radio Live back in July.
Meh. We need a "-1 Not Funny" so when one of my jokes goes over like a lead balloon my karma doesn't get blammed.
I am actually prohibited from using GPL software at work for this very reason.
Right, but you can afford to pay for proprietary licenses for all your software.
With your host, Soulskill.
Seriously, two stories stacked together on the front page today - one going on about the hardships of free software developer/vendors and the dollar value of their products "racing to zero". Then, the other story which skipped over an entire interview with Max Spevack about all sorts of interesting things related to Fedora and RedHat - and cherry-picked one comment about how RedHat would die without the community as the point of focus.
I need breakfast now because this is making me cranky.
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
What about HTML 5? Isn't that a viable choice?
That's the best ever choice for *future* websites.
The problem is that right now, the top most popular video websites don't use HTML 5's video tag (nor HTML's Object tag with a widespread video codec as content type).
To gain popularity you have to support them now. And now means supporting flash.
Also Flash seems to be still popular for casual-/mini-games too. (Javascript+DOM+SVG or +Canvas doesn't seem to catch up that much).
A portable game console with support for flash and access to endless casual entertainment on sites like newsground would be a killer application for Gnash (for example on the Pandora).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Considering the proliferation of GPLed software in everything from Televisions to Routers and Switches I'd say your employer should just close up shop now because they will not be able to avoid the "risk" and still do business.
And thankfully there are a multitude of open source licensed packages on which you can base your business, however as an end user and not a software distributor there is no reason to avoid GPL licensed software. Stop believing the FUD as you are greatly limiting the pool of software at your disposal.
...instead of releasing RPMs and having to support a single distro, software programmers would be free to release one type that was supported by all distros. That cross-distro format may actually be RPMs, but until at least one format is made compatible with all the major package managers, life will continue to be hell for Linux users. The number of websites offering Linux source code only, or straight-up boring binaries so that there are no automatic updates with the user's system updates, is very high because of this, and Linux adoption will continue to creep until this feature among others is added. Yes, believe it or not, you could have one format that has enough metadata to satisfy the requirements of being successfully installed on any system, leaving the package managers to do whatever they wants with the package.
With Linux users loving to talk about document, web, graphics, and other standards, it's a real shame that doing something as important as allowing developers to target a single Linux packaging format, and making it easy for users to enjoy their software freedom, isn't a higher priority.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
So a lot of fine people give a lot of their very valuable time to get Fedora going - for FREE!, so that RedHat doesn't have to spend a pretty penny hiring people to do that.
So far so good!
But then RH has got RHEL, which they won't as much let anybody use for free or make available as free download... Where is the download link for RHEL, Max ? The same RHEL that benefits from community contributions. Instead community is left to only use Fedora!
And no, don't say CentOS! That's somebody else's effort developed with their time & money! Something that they won't have to do if RH had provided free download of RHEL!
Again, Where is the download link of RHEL ?
- mritunjai
Or you could post jokes that don't suck.
OH NO! KARMA GOES WRONG WAY!
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
People always suffer major licensor regret asspain. The Castle folks had a commericial company repackage their core libraries with a fancy mapping GUI for a couple of hundred bucks.
Course in this case, the GUI was totally worth it and I bought a copy, but they did have a bit of a cry how it wasn't in the spirit of the license. (Even though it totally was).
3laws: No freebies, no backsies, GTFO.
I found it amusing. But then I enjoy TF2's humor and style.
This is not the funny you're looking for.
...and their apparent total lack of consumer support, I have plenty of. What introduced me to the idea of free/low-cost/open-source software in the first place was the fact that there was little or zero fiscal outlay initially. I could start using the software /immediately/, and on as many machines as I wanted. If I needed support i could pay for it via a premium rate phone call, which I'm fine with as long as the help is relevant and swift (which most of the time, it is). What I do object to, is forking out stupid amounts of money for a license to use a bitstream embedded on a plastic disc, having to validate the install /on a single machine/ not once (UID key), not twice (activation), but /three times/ (WGA), to find out later that I'd have to go through the same crap every single time something changed. After all of which, the only support I can expect is from the vendor who a: didn't even write the software in the first place and b: probably doesn't even use it so wouldn't know arse from elbow about what the hell I'm carping about.
With FLOSS, the options are there to get help from the community or to go with a support contract with the distributor who probably knows more about the package set than the authors of the individual packages do.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.