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."

Comments

More like bait and switch

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:More like bait and switch

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You're so wrong. The time that convinced me forever that FOSS is fantastic was when I was stuck with a weird problem with a new motherboard, and in desperation I emailed the linux-users mailing list with a plea for advice. 20 minutes later I had a reply from Alan Cox saying "Aha, just the test case I wanted: try this", with a 4 line patch that fixed my problem.
This was at 7pm on a Sunday night.

I have had "premium" contracts from Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, whoever, and I have *never* had response like this from a commercial supplier, and this has happened multiple times to me.

The great thing is, that I feel like a freeloader, so I've contributed where I can. My contributions have been tiny, but there have been many thousands of tiny contributions to FOSS projects, and whilst the tiny contributions by themselves are in no way sufficient to ensure a projects success, they do make a difference.

The 4 line patch that fixed my problem presumably fixed the same problem for hundreds of other users (most of whom probably never encountered the issue); it also helped Alan to test that the patch was worthwhile and saved *him* some bother as well. Me coming up with the problem just as Alan Cox was looking into might seem like a million to one chance, but as Terry Pratchett says, million to one chances happen all the time.

Re:More like bait and switch

[Xest]

"I have had "premium" contracts from Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, whoever, and I have *never* had response like this from a commercial supplier, and this has happened multiple times to me."

The problem is that proprietary vendors have these layers of customer support that are intended to filter out the silly trivial requests that don't require a high level of expertise (the sorts of one's that Alan Cox would see on the mailing list and just ignore leaving for someone with more time and patience to deal with). These premium contacts are a similar thing, you're told they're premium but ultimately they're often just another level of filtering that's only slightly higher up the chain than the bog standard support desk folks.

But for what it's worth when I've had genuine issues that need need this level of support I've had the same experience you have from proprietary vendors, whether it's posting on Microsoft's forums or contact their devs directly with bugs I've found in the past, or whether it was e-mailing John Carmack about some issues I was having with the Quake 3 mod tools many years back, through to the non-technical world of e-mailing the chief exec of BT in the UK because my phone line was screwed and their usual support line was being hopeless (he responded within a few hours to my direct e-mail to him on a Saturday afternoon from his Blackberry and had an engineer out to fix it on a fricking Sunday which still amazes me to this day).

So I don't think your assertion is really fair, yes proprietary vendors have layers of crap that you're supposed to go through, but if you post in the right places, just as you did with your issue, or if you contact the devs directly, you'll get equally good help, not just in tech but in many organisations that on the face of it are seen as faceless and difficult to deal with.

Just because FOSS doesn't have layers of support lines to deal with the chaff (for obvious reasons) doesn't mean that if you go straight to the talent of those companies that do that you're going to get any better a reply than if you do the same with proprietary vendors.

As a counter example, the fact FOSS people are often working in a personal capacity can be detrimental to the responses you get to them - some of the responses I've seen from the PHP folks for example to well written, intelligent, honest and legitimate questions would result in a disciplinary at best, or sacking at worst if the same response was given by a member of staff from a commercial organisation.

This isn't to talk down people like Cox, on the contrary the fact he gave you the response he does was fantastic, but my point is more to defend the devs working at even some of the organisations Slashdot hates like Microsoft - there are some damn good people there too who are damn nice and damn helpful and despite who they work for they deserve the same recognition for the good job they do in going out their way to be equally helpful.

Most highly talented people, the best of the best are contactable and responsive. You just have to actually know where they hang out or take steps to get in touch directly.

True, sort of

[steevven1]

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.

Re:True, sort of

[CanHasDIY]

I think their point is, in any population of X freeloaders, there will be Y people who will, at some point, begin to contribute, so it's never hurtful to have a large population of X.

Plus, the bigger X gets, the bigger Y gets by proportion. Hence the "More freeloaders == more developers" ideology.

Personally, I take a bit of offense to the term 'freeloader.' If you didn't want people using the software without 'paying' in some way, either through fiscal or chronological contributions, you shouldn't be giving it away for free.

I hearby volunteer ...

[PPH]

... my services along with 30 years of experience as a freeloader.

Re:It depends on the project

[jellomizer]

The most successful FOSS projects, are infrastructure based projects.
Linux, Apache, Libraries... These general purpose tools, so a lot of people can use them to do different things.
However when you get further up and too specialized apps they will normally not do do well as FOSS because they are still complex to build however they do not have the wide use age. Thus if you need to make the product succeed you need a model where you need to pay for development.

Animal Farm

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:Force in numbers

[ButchDeLoria]

It goes in reverse, actually; the less people that use a FOSS project, the better it is. After all, open source is only for hipsters that can't afford a proper operating system.

Re:Force in numbers

[cheater512]

Well it would be excellent if your egg laid millions of chickens.
You could charge scientists who want to study your egg.

I thought that this was obvious.

[bmo]

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

I hope GiMP developers are reading this

[erroneus]

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...

Alan Cox - personal help from the world's best

[raymorris]

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.

Re:Force in numbers

[FatLittleMonkey]

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 not as good as it used to be, the devs are idiots, and I've been using [abandoned fork] for two years.

FTFY