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Only Idiots Don't Give Back To Free Software
Julie188 writes "Downstream projects who take without contributing back to the upstream project defeat the benefit of open source and sooner or later, all organizations developing on top of open source code will realize this, contends Jim Zemlin, executive director of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. So the time for cajoling those users — even commercial projects like Canonical — into participating is over. Contributing is 'not the right thing to do because of some moral issue or because we say you should do it. It's because you are an idiot if you don't,'" he says."
Update: 08/30 21:40 GMT by S : Reworded summary to clarify that Zemlin wasn't referring to end users.
Contributing back takes money and can be counter-productive for the community too - especially if it's introduces lots of buggy or bad code. Someone has to go through all of that. This is especially true because whatever you say, making actual contributions takes time and isn't really high in the list of companies priorities. You can say all you want about short-term thinking, but it's just a fact of life. Companies can't really do anything with it - unlike most people seem to think, many companies are working with really strict budgets too. They don't have unlimited access to cash or resources.
If you truly believe in open source, you should let anyone to decide what they do with the code. Some will contribute back, and those will be good contributions. Then some won't, nothing is lost. The same is why I think BSD license is much better GPL - if you truly believe in freedom, you let everyone to decide themselves. After all, open source was created to free people from proprietary code and people telling them what they can't do.
The context of the statement was (intentionally) left out of the headline and summary. This isn't about end-users. Zemlin is talking about the financial incentive for contributing back to projects whose code a business or other organization is using. In other words, if your business tries to do things on its own, such as maintaining its own kernel, it's making an idiotic business decision because it's not benefiting from collective maintenance and improvement.
Here is the relevant section in the article:
Hardcore open source (well, fill in anything here, but in this case it's an open source guy) advocate thinks doing thinks the way he thinks should be done is smart, and doing things other ways is stupid.
For someone who's a professional advocate for Open Source, I don't think he makes a very compelling argument that it's in everyone's enlightened self-interest to give as well as take. Certainly I've seen better arguments to that effect in slashdot comments.
Not for trying to get money for the people you represent, but for calling people idiots and expecting them to open their wallets.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
...sometimes idiots *do* give back to free software.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
...the difference between open source and a proprietary model is to allow people to be idiots? Correct me if I'm wrong.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
His comment is about organizations, such as Linux distros, using open source code and not contributing back their changes to take advantage of the collective maintenance of open source code. That's why he uses the phrase "upstream project" in the summary and calls it a good business decision in TFA.
Network World and /. have both given this story an unnecessarily inflammatory slant. Zemlin's argument is "Maintaining your own fork of Linux for your product or service is an absurdly large amount of work for precious little return - if you let your business put much time into such things when there's no benefit to your business maintaining its own fork; it could simply pass patches upstream and let upstream take on some of the maintenance worries, you're being an idiot".
Arguably, there is some logic to this. Lots of companies sell Linux appliances - either as virtual appliances, pre-loaded on hardware or as embedded systems - make changes to lots of things but never submit patches upstream.
I think I'm starting to see why corporate PR-spun statements are always so bland. There's no way a corporate PR department would let something like that through precisely because of the likelihood of such slanted articles resulting from it.
I always thought of reporting bugs to the developers as a way of giving back. If I were a developer, I'd be grateful to every bug report. But with the recent debate about the long list of unconfirmed Firefox bugs, I now begin to feel like someone who asks for free lunch. That's an unfortunate trend. That way, I'll end up figuring out a workaround to the problem and keep it to myself. Wasn't the idea that the wheel shouldn't be invented again and again one of the main reasons to adopt and advocate FOSS?
Great engineers write code because they love to and cant stop. Mediocre and lousy engineers write code (for some reasons) so they get ego points "contributing" to open source and hope to pad their resume. The great engineers then have to evaluate and fix their lousy code. Or it slips by and the whole suffers. I would love help from the great engineers for my open source projects but would prefer no help at all from the rest. Even then it will take work to make sure its up to my standards or biased egotistical opinions. "Its a cathedral not a bazaar". The best software I've ever seen and used was written by very few people, usually only one. A few exceptions (say Linux itself) but shouldn't be taken as the model for Open Source but rather a magical exception.
incredibly fucking awesome engineers get paid megabucks to do their job and then they jump in their Ferrari, go home to their lingerie model wife, get a blowjob right before their private chef serves them their meal, and then, if he's in the mood, bangs her sister - the swim suite model - while the wife watches and masturbates.
BTW, you'll never see them post on Slashdot because:
They're creating awesome World saving software
They're shopping for a new Ferrari
Banging their model Wife or her sister or her lingerie model friends or all of them at once.
Or he's reading tech journals while sipping single malt 500 year old scotch.
Sleeping from all the work and model banging he has been doing.
Except Ubuntu, which can best contribute by keeping unity contained to it's own OS.
Contributions...... that needs to be done by people who *really* know what they are doing. People that can participate and fix bugs and have a deeper understanding of the software.
Not really. I'm a hardware guy with a minimal understanding of C. I was working with a friend and colleague to implement Asterisk for an office of 60 extensions when we found a bug in the voicemail conf parser. (In 1.2 iirc). I worked through the problem and modified the code to fix it, but in analyzing the original code I couldn't explain why it didn't work. Still I contributed the fix and it was accepted. You don't have to be a super software guru to contribute code to OSS.
Sig is on vacation
Calling people idiots. He's young looking, maybe not so mature? Let's see, what has Jim Zemlin done... The about him from his blog. His staff page at the Linux foundation. Seems like... a manager in marketing? Aside from blabbing off, what are his contributions?