Slashdot Mirror
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:
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."
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.