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.

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.

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...

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