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.'"

Comments

everybody in open source is to some extent used

[jacquesm]

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.

Re:everybody in open source is to some extent used

[Anonymous Coward]

Your point sounds right, but has a fatal flaw: The contributions by the community, although used by the business, are still free to be used by the community.

Re:everybody in open source is to some extent used

[jacquesm]

Yes, but that won't get you any bread on the table now, will it ?

There is absolutely no renumeration for the people that code up all that really neat stuff and the businesses that take that hard work and profit of it (and profit of it in ways that would have been considered impossible until not that long ago) are under no obligation whatsoever to share the profits.

Re:everybody in open source is to some extent used

[betterunixthanunix]

True but selling software is an inherently flawed business model anyway, that requires extensive propping up by the law and heavy investment in anti-copying technology. It is an industry held together by tape and bubble gum, which is why most software companies have been moving toward other business models, like selling support or selling indemnification against patent lawsuits (or just becoming patent trolls, in the case of smaller companies).

One way of solving the issue is to integrate open source development with another line of work. For example, a paid researcher at a university might fix a bug in Octave, which would help his work, and then send that patch upstream (barring, of course, the university's management telling him that he cannot, which is unfortunately the case in some institutions).

Re:everybody in open source is to some extent used

[bsDaemon]

In terms of your life's work actually contributing tangible benefits to man kind, computational biology is going to outstrip "IT" anyway. I don't think that decreased financial incentive is really going to be the kicker there.

Plus, you know, more chicks in bio.

Re:everybody in open source is to some extent used

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Well first of all, Red Hat employs a lot of Fedora developers (like me), which is certainly worth a lot more than a lousy coffee cup.

Secondly your premise is wrong: Fedora developers - those not employed by Red Hat - keep working on Fedora despite not getting any rewards. Why is that? Well, some work for reputation instead of money. A large number work for other companies who benefit from the mutual sharing of code. The vast majority, however, don't work for / on Fedora at all. They work for Ubuntu, GNOME, Apache, and a thousand other upstream projects, and we in Fedora and Red Hat package up those projects. (Packaging, while an important activity, is only a tiny part of the process of writing free software).

Rich.

Re:everybody in open source is to some extent used

[Anonymous Coward]

"selling software is an inherently flawed business model anyway"....erm, last I checked some dude going by the name of Bill Gates was worth $50B and that's from selling software.

Re:everybody in open source is to some extent used

[lucifuge31337]

even better a free copy of RHEL so they can see where their code is going.

Its called CentOS.

Six Month Cycles

[Sanat]

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.
   

The hearty handshake (apologies to W C Fields)

[westlake]

"How can developers who are working for free protect themselves and avoid getting exploited by business users of Linux?

.
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.

Re:The hearty handshake (apologies to W C Fields)

[spevack]

Expecting volunteers to carry 2/3 of the load for Fedora seems a bit much.

We don't *expect* volunteers to maintain 2/3 of Fedora's packages. That is just what the numbers ended up being, and they flux often as different people either adopt or orphan packages depending on their circumstances.

Re:The hearty handshake (apologies to W C Fields)

[burnin1965]

The better question for Red Hat might be "How many developers can continue to work for free in the present economic climate?

A better question would start with some research to understand who the Fedora developers are and who pays them if they are paid. Basing a question on the same tired falsehood that open source developers are unpaid geeks living in their parent's basements is rather tired and dated.

If the linux kernel contributions are any clue only 15% of contributors are unpaid. And I'm sure they have their reasons for contributing which go beyond simply making a buck.
linuxkerneldevelopment

Re:Red Hat

[jacquesm]

you've been doing way too much oop programming lately ;)

Re:Ohh Fedora...have you improved?

[betterunixthanunix]

"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/."

You should give Fedora 9 a try, it has out of the box swfdec (which is 95% there in terms of flash, should not be long before it is 100%) and OpenJDK (which is 100% there in terms of Java support; the only issue I ever had was an applet that actually tried making direct sound system calls to the Windows sound system, no joke, which one can hardly blame OpenJDK for). I was skeptical at first, as these were not too solid in Fedora 8, but after 6 months of using them, I am thoroughly impressed. Also, assuming you are not on an unsupported configuration, you can always add the yum repo. for Adobe's proprietary flash, which is a pretty basic RPM install that integrates with the automated updates.

Bread on the table

[DrYak]

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.

We have to get Gootube behind Gnash !

[DrYak]

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).

a bit of context

[spevack]

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.

Re:Thank You Max For Reminding Everyone

[k33l0r]

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.

HTML5 for the future, Gnash for the past

[DrYak]

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).

Re:Red Hat

[argiedot]

Good point. However, it's possible that we underestimate just how much Red Hat, Novell and IBM contribute to the kernel. To the 2.6.20 kernel, for instance, these three contributed nearly a fourth of all changes.

Re:Red Hat

[init100]

IIRC, Red Hat doesn't actually mind people making and distributing RHEL rebuilds. People that are unwilling to pay for a support contract are not customers that Red Hat is interested in, so they don't mind them going to CentOS instead. It is also better than having them go to Ubuntu, because with a CentOS deployment, if they change their minds later on, migrating them to RHEL would be a piece of cake.

Re:Where is the payback ?

[blitzkrieg3]

Again, Where is the download link of RHEL ?

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/enterprise