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Why Freeloaders Are Essential To FOSS Project Success
dp619 writes "Outercurve Foundation technical director Stephen Walli has written a blog post arguing that attracting users is fundamental to the ability of open source projects to recruit 'new blood' and contributors who are willing to code. 'So in the end, it's all about freeloaders, but from the perspective that you want as many as possible. That means you're "doing it right" in developing a broad base of users by making their experience easy, making it easy for them to contribute, and ultimately to create an ecosystem that continues to sustain itself,' he wrote."
If your FOSS project only has a handful of users, it's nice.
If your FOSS project has thousands of users, it's good.
If your FOSS project has millions of users, it's excellent.
Obviously. An operating system, programming language, database, application framework or other infrastructure piece needs lots of users, whether paying or not.
A game or end-user oriented app at the top of the food chain needs people (advertisers, users, or service providers) willing to pay for ongoing development.
Lure them in with promises that Linux is ready for the desktop, then force them to help fix the sorry mess. Only report a bug if you want it to coming flying back as a boomerang for you to help debug/trace/fix/that yourself. And I'm only about half trolling.
This is true in what it is trying to say. I started using FOSS because it was useful, not because I had any intention of contributing. Now, I regularly file bug reports and do what I can to help out and answer the questions of others. However, "freeloaders" who stay freeloaders forever are not actually necessary, except maybe that they will tell others who will end up not being freeloaders. The bottom line is: The expectation value of helpfulness for a "freeloader" is absolutely not negative.
Bums on seats.
Have gnu, will travel.
In the UK there's a big push to get scientists, particularly young ones, to engage with the public at large and in schools. Paul Nurse recently noted a major benefit of this beyond educating the public, is the scientists themselves found it makes better researchers. They thought they understood what they were doing, but having to rephrase for direct back'n'forth brought more focus and clarity to their work. Result being they were very keen to keep talking to people as a regular and re-energizing task.
I _do_ understand why 'devs' want separation from 'users'. Nobody wants to get bogged down in a tech support nightmare, or get entangled with the worst of humans in forums and blog comments. Maybe we should look to doing more face-to-face forms like lectures, and even slashdot style moderated 'ask anything' question sessions.
Orwell had a good analogy in Animal Farm. He was writing about the evolutionary process of socialism. Note, the "problem" was never the cat. It was always the pigs. The cat never caused a problem. Never harmed anyone. And didn't get in the way or drag anyone down. For whatever reason, the "freeloader" is always the enemy. But in reality, the freeloader doesn't create a load, and doesn't harm anyone. They are used by the pigs as a scapegoat, but don't themselves do any harm to anyone.
Learn to love Alaska
People tend to forget that their FOSS project is meaningless if people don't use it. Calling them "freeloaders" in general does a disservice to the users. I have a feeling it derives from the fact that the only interaction that developers have with their users is as a number next to the download counter and some extra megabytes added to the bandwidth bill. If they actually got involved in the community suddenly there is a name to attach to that number. It's difficult to define what "involved in the community" means without invoking development work, though.
The funny thing to me is that you see this same contempt for the end user in surprising places. The crackers who make piracy possible, for instance, absolutely hate the people they serve.
They don't even tolerate /themers/.
Depends on how you define "success". If you define it as being popular (i.e. has many users), the thesis in the article is basically tautological.
For any amount of freeloaders, you will get people who want to fix things. This is my biggest complaint at people who dislike Ubuntu and other distros that make Linux "easy." Ubuntu and the other easy distros get fresh-meat, and eventually some of that fresh meat becomes part of the coding community.
Without fresh-meat, Linux would regress to less than a hobbyist operating system, and one pointed and laughed at as a waste of time.
The "elitists" are the ones who would eventually kill Linux.
--
BMO
There has been a lot of flack about changes made in the 2.8.x GIMP. The developers insist "this is how it is and how it will be, no more discussion" despite the wrongness of it all. Many users wish to support the developers out of gratitude. I understand it, but I don't agree with it. People who speak out are slapped down and it doesn't matter if they have a good point or not. They just don't want to listen to their users and have said "if you're not a developer, you are not contributing, so shut up."
It's just wrong... and bad...
That's one thing that pleasantly suprised me about Linux and OSS in general as well. I had a problem that I thought might be related to Linux RAID. After following the suggestions in "How to Ask Questions the Smart Way" I got a personal email from the RAID maintainer, with a fix. Try getting the lead dev of any major Microsoft aystem to personally assist you.
(for Windows fans, Alan Cox is the Balmer of Linux, Linus's designated successor.)
I'm reminded of when my brother first switched to free software. He had a request for an improvement in Firefox. He was slightly suprised when I showed him that he could file a feature request and the devs would actually read it. He was SHOCKED 36 hours later when I sent him a link to the nightly build - with his requested feature added. Meanwhile, we're still waiting on Microsoft to fix an IE bug they've had listed for 12 years.
Look at JMRI as an example.
Focused audience, great functionality, new things being added, users contribute all the time, etc.
If you do not run model trains with DCC, you might say 'what?'.
If you do, this is an essential tool.
Just try and be this good! :)
(And even a successful whopping of a troll to boot!)
I think the label "freeloader" is a major part of the problem - it is only appropriate for talking about economies of scarcity. Where a freeloader actually consumes resources that other more "deserving" people would otherwise get.
For an economy of plenty - like free software - we need a more appropriate, more positive term to better describe what happens and to denote the positive values. The first thing that comes to my mind is "cheerleader" but there are probably better names - any suggestions?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
This is true in what it is trying to say. I started using FOSS because it was useful, not because I had any intention of contributing. Now, I regularly file bug reports and do what I can to help out and answer the questions of others. However, "freeloaders" who stay freeloaders forever are not actually necessary, except maybe that they will tell others who will end up not being freeloaders. The bottom line is: The expectation value of helpfulness for a "freeloader" is absolutely not negative.
Question is - how typical would be your experience?
Most people who are freeloaders do not contribute code, do not write documentation or file bug reports - the latter 2 of which do NOT require programming skills. And people who are freeloaders are often easy to sway w/ the newest and coolest free stuff. This is not to say that having a large user base ain't useful, but the value of that, as in this article, is way overrated.
The biggest issue about freeloaders in software is that done early enough, it breaks the revenue stream that a company needs to be profitable, or even break even. When a company writes software, there are costs incurred in doing that, and its estimates on the optimal sale point where those costs can be recovered is how it determines the per license price. But once people start redistributing it, the company would no longer see a revenue stream from potential customers. Yeah, yeah, many of them would not be customers if they could not get that stuff for free, but it's perfectly legit for any company to want its only users to be its paying customers.
The whole deal about Linux is that there are the distros, none of which can be charged for in the practical sense, since nobody would then buy it, given the $0.00 price tag of all other distros. So anybody who makes a distro is left scouring for ways in which to earn revenue. Most often, it's the tin cup model, which sounds fine & dandy, except that few really contribute. On the flip side, the uncertainties about whether Linux would work OOTB or not is another reason people would balk at spending money buying a distro.
So unless and until something can be done to convert those numbers of freeloaders into something tangible, that expanded user base is worthless as far as determining the success of a platform goes.
For example the 3D package Blender is very successful as a project. Because it has a wide user base, and the users are technically proficient, and can also start coding and scripting in the application itself.
But I would not call that an infrastructure project.
...To figure out you were talking about regular users.
Why Pirates Are Essential To Commerical Product Success
FOSS has the reputation that it sometimes has due to activists like the FSF who scream foul if any attempts are made to secure the income streams that result from writing FOSS. Particularly, the FSF crowd, which loves to nitpick over what's exactly 'free' and what ain't. It's their efforts that have given the term 'free' a negative aura in the industry.
They are potential value add customers.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
of the population that never pay for their software.
I'll never convince these people to help fund development. My job will be to take care of the 53 percent.
Science has answered the age-old question: Which came first: the chicken or the egg?
In evolutionary terms, it was definitely the egg, just not a chicken egg.
The only people who matter in open source are the people who start projects. They get all the attention and respect - and job offers. Grunts who write documentation and fix bugs get nothing. So why would any rational actor contribute to an existing project, when starting a project is the way to get ahead? The people who started Python, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Spring, and so on are the ones whose names are known and who are working for major companies now. Name one person who writes open-source documentation. If there was some path for me to write documentation or fix bugs and get a job, I'd be all for it.
Yes, I once had an exchange of emails with the developer of mdadm. He very patiently helped me explore a problem I had got myself into, and it also resulted in him adding a line to the documentation. This was essentially a PEBKAC error, with me being the one on the chair!
I raised 4 bugs with xine, 2 trivial, 1 moderate, and one obscure - all got fixed.
Once a new kernel had a bug which prevented my system accessing a dial up modem properly, there was an updated kernel in less than 24 hours with the fix. Alan Cox himself replied to my initial bug report.
I have have had Michael Meeks, a leading LibreOffice developer, remote access my machine (with my express permission) to investigate a bug that I had raised.
Though I was a lot less successful in the bugs I raised for OpenOffice, and some other FOSS projects.