The Failed Economics of Our Software Commons

An anonymous reader writes: Most software developers are intimately familiar with having to waste time implementing something they probably shouldn't need to implement, or spending countless hours making their code work with bad (but required) software. Developer Paul Chiusano says this is because the economic model we use for building software just doesn't work. He writes, "What's the problem? In software, everyone is solving similar problems, and software makes it trivial to share solutions to these problems (unlike physical goods), in the form of common libraries, tools, etc. This ease of sharing means it makes perfect sense for actors to cooperate on the development of solutions to common problems. ... Obviously, it would be crazy to staff such critical projects largely with a handful of unpaid volunteers working in their spare time. Er, right?? Yet that is what projects like OpenSSL do. A huge number of people and businesses ostensibly benefit from these projects, and the vast majority are freeriders that contribute nothing to their development. This problem of freeriders is something that has plagued open source software for a very long time." Chiusano has some suggestions on how we can improve the way we allocate resources to software development.

Comments

All goes according to plan

[Sneftel]

If you don't want free riders, don't make free software.

You get to choose your license. You don't get to complain that people are following it.

Summary, or tl;dr

[phantomfive]

The article is long and poorly organized (that is, the organization is stream of conscious writing like most bloggers; he goes off into a mini-rant about how much he hates CSS/HTML, for example). Here is a summary, as well as I can understand it:

1) A new non-profit is trying to make it easy to fund open-source software, with a new donation method. You can donate, but your donation doesn't go through until ten (or X) other people donate the same amount.

2) This will increase funding for open source projects because:
* Companies don't want to fund open source if someone else will do it.
* It will be cheaper TCO for companies to fund open source projects they use. For example, if OpenSSL had been given more money, they would have fewer bugs (probably by rewriting everything in Erlang; really, that's what he said).

That is literally it. In all 2000 words he wrote, I cannot find another single point that supports his main thesis, that the new non-profit will increase funding for open source-projects. He however did spend a lot of words explaining that popular open source projects should get more money from the companies that use them, so that's something.