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Almost Two-Thirds of Software Companies Contributing To Open Source, Says Survey (networkworld.com)
Reader alphadogg writes: Open source's march toward preeminence in business software continued over the past year, according to a survey released by open source management provider Black Duck Software and venture capital firm North Bridge. Roughly two-thirds of respondents to the survey -- which was administered online and drew 1,300 respondents -- said that their companies encouraged developers to contribute to open-source projects, and a similar proportion said that they were actively engaged in doing so already. That's a 5% increase from the previous year's survey.
/. can't even manage basic editorial tasks?
That is not the same as companies contributing. How many of these companies are allowing their developers to contribute on company time? Sure go work for free on a project with an MIT licence the company can then use for free.
The MIT and BSD licenses maximize freedom for developers and users. The GPL family of licenses, on the other hand, gives slightly more control to the developer, but removes a lot of freedom from the users of said code.
In a free-market environment, businesses will opt to deal with software having truly free licenses like the MIT and BSD licenses, rather than free-in-hype-only licenses like the GPL family of licenses.
Oh Bullshit, the only freedom the GPL limits is the freedom to be a commercial leach and sell other people's work as your own. If you don't want to play by the GPL rules, fine, don't, but quit whining about losing freedoms that you never had.
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Said the GPL fanatic who loves to leech BSD code as well.
It's probably worse because GPL locks up the BSD code - any improvements made to the BSD code cannot be contributed back to the original project!
So maybe it should be less about "closed source leeching" and more about "GPL leeching" as well. Because at least Microsoft and other closed-source companies either contribute, or don't. GPL code makes improvements that cannot be integrated back whilst claiming superiority. And parading the modified code as a big F-U to the BSD folks
Always notice how GPL always claims "closed source exploitation" and not "GPL exploitation"? I think this attitude is worse than just Microsoft etc. "leeching"..
...and rewritten as a car analogy, because why not?
The automotive industry's march toward preeminence continued over the past year, according to a survey released by automotive manufacturer Toyota and people with a financial incentive to keep Toyota relevant. Roughly two-thirds of respondents to the survey -- which drew 1,300 online responses from Toyota's most loyal followers -- said that their companies had parking spots for cars, and a similar proportion said that they actually remember the last time they drove a car. That's a 5% increase from the previous year's survey.
Most companies have the sense not to share numbers indicating that 1/3 of their most loyal followers have no active interest or need for their services. You'd just say that there's been a 5% uptick, year-over-year, and leave it at that. Sure, it's nice to see growth, but "encouraging" devs costs these companies nothing, contributing to open source is potentially of immense value to the developers engaged in it, and yet there's still a full third among the people most likely to be doing it who aren't doing it. That's the shocking thing here.
@Anonymous Coward: "One thing I find very interesting is how nearly all are opting to not use and/or contribute to software with a license from the GPL family."
Where does it say that?
The problem with the GPL for a lot of companies is that it's an all or nothing question. There's a fairly common sequence of adoption for BSD licensed code in companies:
First, they look at it and say 'this must be too good to be true, we can take it and not give anything back? Amazing!'. Then they get their lawyers to check the license and find that's really what it says, so that's what they do.
After a while, they discover that they've fixed some bugs that are only triggered by their workloads or added some features that they particularly need. Then they find that someone else has implemented something similar (often less suitable for their requirements) upstream and now it's difficult for them to merge bug fixes and security updates from upstream.
Next they realise that their business does depend on doing something that this code does, but their private fork isn't something that gives them a competitive advantage, it's just a cost centre (much like the rest of IT, according to their bean counters). Upstreaming their changes means that they get to design new features to fit their requirements and means that pulling down fixes is trivial, so they start doing that. At the same time, they may be linking the code with something that really does give them a competitive advantage.
There's no real equivalent with the GPL. As soon as you start distributing (a fairly poorly defined term) the GPL'd code, you have to release everything that links it under a GPL-compatible license. That's a big psychological barrier to try to overcome all at once. The typical reaction is for companies to decide to not use the GPL'd code and write a new in-house proprietary replacement. If you're very lucky, they'll write a BSDL replacement instead and so at least this only has to happen once.
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>It's probably worse because GPL locks up the BSD code - any improvements made to the BSD code cannot br contributed back to the original project!
I don't think you understand what the GPL is and isn't. I can author an improvement in BSDed code used in my GPed project and offer the improvement back to the original authors under the BSD license. If it's my code i can do what I want with, if it;s my code, you can only do what I allow with it.
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