The Role of Freeloaders In Open Source Communities

dp619 writes "The Outercurve Foundation has published a defense of freeloaders as part of a blog series on how businesses can participate in open source. '...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. Freeloaders are essential to the growth and success of every FOSS project.'"

Comments

Freeloaders

[aXis100]

Otherwise known as regular users???

Re:Freeloaders

[dimko]

Yeah, that's what assholes call us. If you don't like your user base - just don't open source your code, thank you very much,

Re:Freeloaders

[Chrisq]

There are two kinds of them : the one who complains for any reason and often doesn't even know why, wasting coders' time, and the one who sends logically articulated problem reports (not necessarily in a bug tracker), helping coders to improve their software.

Three kinds - the I expect the most common user is probably one who doesn't report anything but just uses the features that work.

Re:Freeloaders

[dimko]

Who, happen to be who? That's right, users(consumers)! :* At the end of the day, open source was made to attract people who can improve code, and in order for i to happend, they need to use code in the first place! Oh, and btw, you are also wong about developers. I am no developer, but I submit bugs to Firefox, etc, so I am part of development progress. I suggest ideas too! So define freeloader. User != freeloader. If I sugget someoen OSS, am I still freeloader? I do marketing for developer too?

Re:Freeloaders

[martin-boundary]

Not usually. A lot of open source (licensed as BSD or variations thereof) is about creating software that will get used EVERYWHERE, and discouraging competing projects that do the same task. The devs don't want more devs involved (if they did they should be using the GPL instead), what they want is to make it so that their software is basically the one and only correct way to do something, ie their vision is it. So they give their code away without any requirement to give back from anybody, or any requirement to improve it, etc. The reasoning is basically that if it's available and anybody can take it and rebrand it and sell it etc, then companies will do the math and won't build their own. So the BSD software "wins".

Re:Freeloaders

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the primary directive behind open source is peer review, which in turn produces better code.

There is no such thing as a primary directive behind open source. Everyone who decides to release their source code does so for different reasons. Do not try to second guess what the intent of the license is.
Likewise, never assume that a "loophole" in a license is a bug or a flaw, most likely it is intentional and probably the reason to why the author chose that license over the million other licenses out there.
Also, respect the Beerware-license it isn't a joke. Some people just value drinking beer with a stranger more than a small monetary compensation.

  * "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
  * wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
  * can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
  * this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp
 

Not freeloaders

[Todd Knarr]

They aren't "freeloaders". They're called "users". Without them, there's no point to creating software except for stuff you personally need. And there's more stuff you need than you have the time or the skill to create, so you will be one of those users a lot more often than you're a contributor. Users aren't a problem, they're the reason software exists in the first place.

Re:Not freeloaders

[bug1]

Users are freeloaders if they are ideologically opposed to contributing or participating in the community.

If people dont contribute because they dont know how, but would like to, then that fine, maybe one day they will be able to. Nothing to lose, everythign to gain by havign them around.

If people (or more likely corporations) are ideologically opposed to contributing back to the communtiy because they dont want to mix "their valuable IP" with the communities IP then are a dead weight to us. We would be much better off pushing them to use inferior proprietary software so their competitors who arent so short sighted can win.

[end rant]

Re:Not freeloaders

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really, assuming this reluctance to contribute back doesn't extend to bug reports.

Just using the software and reporting bugs is valuable.

99.99% are freeloaders

[gnasher719]

For every piece of open source software, 99.99% of the people who use it are end users who will never, ever look at the source code and who will never, ever contribute to it. Even active open source developers will never, ever contribute to most of the open source software out there.

So if you remove all the "freeloaders", most of the purpose of the software is gone. In the official GPL rationale, the whole purpose of the GPL is to make sure that the "freeloaders" cannot only use the software, but are free to modify it - without contributing anything. (Not that I agree with the rationale, because the percentage of end users who can actually take advantage of these rights is minuscule).

Freeloader here - willing to help!

[Anonymous Coward]

Count me in! I am a freeloader, but willing to help. When do I start? I volunteer to: Put the permanent status bar back in FireFox so I don't need an extension. Get rid of Gnome 3 entirely. Revert the GIMP's atrocious Save As.../Export As... abomination. Oh, right, these projects are closed cluster****s, and don't want me to help. Sorry, I'll go back to being a freeloader now.