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Should Enterprise IT Give Back To Open Source?
snydeq writes "InfoWorld reports on the fight over open source 'leeches' — companies that use open source technology but don't give back to the open source community. While some view such organizations as a tragedy of the commons, others view the notion of 'freeloaders' as a relic of open source's Wild West era, when coding was a higher calling and free software a religion. To be sure, increased adoption by mainstream enterprises has played a hand in changing the terms of this debate. Yet, as the biggest consumer of open source software, enterprise IT still gives almost nothing back to the community, critics contend, calling into question the long-term effect corporate culture will have on the evolution of open source — and the long-term effect open source will have on rewiring companies toward collaboration."
...I once quite a job over this exact problem. Managers at my old company constantly claimed "cost savings and ROI" by using these "new software tools" but didn't dare mention they were FOSS tools for fear of ridicule by the "CTO and CIO" folks who get their "tech news" from trade rags. Then, once I wrote a neat tool for file synchronization over several Linux boxen I asked to open it up because I needed help and also because I knew others in the community would benefit; and yes I was saving the company money. They said "No." and I said, "OK, I'm out." They offered more money and I said "I'm still out." Granted most folks on Slashdot will think I'm an idiot and not "American" or a "Capitalist" for doing such a thing but I sincerely believe folks need to start doing what I did in order to get it through the management brain that "without our code, you have no cost advantage over the competition." Now, unleash the /. ridicule hounds...
I work for a large company that uses Open Source Software as its backbone. I have been pushing for us to put some money into some of the projects that we use, or to recontribute some of the patches we've made. In both cases, I am met with the stubborn answer "that is our intellectual property". Trying to argue that the spirit of Open Source to recontribute to improve products, and that we've built our company upon that spirit and so we should contribute falls on deaf ears. We've now gotten big enough that the senior management and lawyers are more concerned with our IP than with supporting the community that supported us when we were starting. It's bad enough that I'm not even allowed to post code snippets/example bind or ntp configs etc on to various mailing lists I may be on because they also belong to "us".
There is a strong push at the technical level to recontribute, to fund a couple of the projects that we use heavily, but ultimately it's the higher ups and the legal folks that say no way.
I expect things like that are the reason enterprises are leeches, and I expect there is a large contingent of technical workers who disagree with the decision. I know I do.
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
They're also giving back by submitting bug reports and helping devs find problems in the software. They might also help others solve problems in mailing lists and forums.
Most users that give back give back in the same way. Why should we hold small companies to a higher standard?
*sigh* back to work...
Many organizations use open source, but actively have policies that prevent giving code back. Systems to prevent this may backfire, because if an organization *had* to give back, they might just think it's safer to go with closed source. True or not, many lawyers prefer a draconian closed source license that has been paid for over an open license that hasn't. The closed source license is perceived to have been more tested by the courts. Since closed licenses are all different, while GPL, Apache, BSD, and CC are published, well researched, and not overreaching, I don't know why they would reach that conclusion. Some companies have exclusive contracts that have only been seen by a handful of attorneys, while the major open source license have been seen and debated by the World.
Most companies have an overinflated view of the value of their contributions, (although they only paid their programmers industry standard wages) so they put up internal barriers that make it difficult or impossible to give back.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Most open source licenses say that as long as you don't modify the source, you don't have to contribute.
As long as companies are obeying the license agreement, then why complain?
I would say that as long as they obey the terms of the license agreement (and whether or not they contribute themselves) then this is a win for open source software.
The OSI _and_ the FSF.
I'm not sure that's possible for anyone at this point.
Good riddance. I'm glad the OSI did what they did, and I'm glad because it allows the pragmatic OSS people to be disassociated with the FSF while still with them in some underlying principles. Now, I'm grateful for what the FSF has done, but they will usually stick to their ideals when it's impractical. I simply want people to use my code, and if they redistribute it, then they should give their changes back to me. That's all I want, not some dream about people using free software everywhere (although I have no problem with that either).
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
I give back. I support, test, evangelize, promote, install, use, help others use FOSS.
I use FOSS because it is FREE (Libre AND Gratis). Because of Linux (and other FOSS), I've helped change the minds of many people to the benefits of FOSS.
Just recently, My Father-in-law had to reset his laptop (unfortunately XP) and had to re-install Adobe CS Suite. Well Adobe said he had too many installs already, and to call in. He called in, and they said "We don't support that version any longer".
We all know to expect this behavior, but this was completely the last straw for my FIL, and he told the support person he will never use Adobe ever again.
After I put in a Linux Server for him (Document Backup), and he saw how well it worked, he asked if Linux would work on his laptop. :-D
So, we take Linux to one person at a time. We all work towards this.
And while it may not look like we are making much progress, we are. I can recall back in the early days of Linux, how much of a "joke" it was. Well, slowly and surely it is starting to make real impact into the world.
That impact is not because of corporate support for FOSS, it is because FOSS is being worked into corporate, just like when PC's started to sneak into corporate 35 years ago.
One day, corporate is going to wake up and realize that FOSS is in the workplace, because the tools they have provided are not sufficient.
Then ... you win.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Nice job completely missing the point. If there were an award for such a thing, you'd probably win it for this article.
My point is that there's no reason why people should be able to use software as much as they please, but things suddenly become magically different when it's used by a company. Or rather, used by people in the company; the company itself is but a legal construct and incapable of using software. You don't see whiny free software advocates complaining about people running giant Linux clusters without giving anything of any sort back, or about people using FOSS for profit (as long as they're not doing it for a company). It's just "oh it's a company this is completely different for no reason whatsoever".
Unless he can come up with a damn good reason for why there should be such a distinction, my point stands.
Oh, the irony.
A Raleigh, NC-based firm, Relevance, Inc. (who I am using for my entrepreneurial venture), has "Open Source Fridays" where all of their employees take the day to work on open source. It makes for much better employees, as they often end up using the very patches they help write, and they can best utilize the nuances of languages they put careful study into. Justin Gehtland is CEO-- he wrote "Pragmatic Ajax", "Rails of Java Developers", the Ajax section of "ADWR", and won a Jolt Award for coauthoring "Better, Faster, Lighter Java". Relevance has a number of employees who collaborate on major pragmatic books or even conceive and execute themselves, like Stuart Halloway's "Programming Clojure". The benefit of working hard in open source is that your employees become incredible programmers. Here's some books by people on staff: http://thinkrelevance.com/books Here's a link to their work on open source: http://thinkrelevance.com/open-source