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.

Comments

Anyone should be free to decide

[ge7]

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.

Re:Anyone should be free to decide

[Hatta]

Contributing back takes money

Money they saved by going open source. It will cost less to help collectively maintain open software than it will to purchase a license for proprietary software.

This is especially true because whatever you say, making actual contributions takes time and isn't really high in the list of companies priorities

If they're using open source software, they must value what that software does for them. If nobody helps maintain it, it will go away. Complaining about contributing back to open source software is like complaining about the food you have to buy for the goose that lays golden eggs.

They don't have unlimited access to cash or resources.

Yes, the argument is that it's more economical to contribute to a healthy OSS ecosystem than it is to either leech off of an unhealthy OSS ecosystem or buy proprietary.

Re:Anyone should be free to decide

[kthreadd]

Sure. The point is that if you're working on a proprietary project then why do you think you should have the right to take GPL-licensed code? What makes it different from completely closed code that you can't even see at all? By all means use code that is permissively licensed and be thankful for it, if GPL isn't open enough then just don't use it.

Re:Anyone should be free to decide

[Chris Burke]

But you are restricting the freedoms of anyone that uses your GPL ridden code.

Restricting their freedom to restrict freedom.

Anyone capable of caring about the freedom of anyone but themselves -- i.e. not a sociopath -- can see that this minimal restriction maximizes freedom for everyone.

You are not free to own slaves. Therefore your freedom is restricted? This makes you less free? Or is freedom maximized for everyone, because nobody -- including you -- can be made a slave?

Misleading headline and summary

[bonch]

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:

Zemlin, who spoke with Network World editors at the recent LinuxCon event, used to preach that contributing back was important on moral grounds, as the "right thing to do." But now he says, "It doesn't matter. I don't care if anyone contributes back." Sooner or later, he believes contributing will become an obvious business decision. It's "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. You're an idiot because the whole reason you're using open source is to collectively share in development and collectively maintain the software. Let me tell you, maintaining your own version of Linux ain't cheap, and it ain't easy," he says.

He points out that Red Hat is one of the largest contributors to the kernel and also one of the most successful Linux distros. "So if some aren't giving back as much as others today, I just think it will naturally happen over time. It always is in their business interest to do so," Zemlin says.

Re:Misleading headline and summary

[idontgno]

Not inflammatory enough.

Seriously.

Think of the page views. Why won't ANYONE think of the PAGE VIEWS?

Unfortunately...

[MrEricSir]

...sometimes idiots *do* give back to free software.

Linux Foundation hasn't found any PR people, then.

[jimicus]

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.