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Samsung Open-Source Group Reportedly Shuts Down (phoronix.com)
At a time when several companies have grown new interest in open sourcing part of their offerings, Samsung appears to be going the other way. The company has shut down the Samsung Open-Source Group (Samsung OSG), according to a report. Phoronix, which reported the development, offers some background: Samsung's Open-Source Group had been structured within Samsung Research America. Samsung OSG was formed back in 2012 and has employed dozens of developers over the past number of years. Samsung OSG was akin to Intel OTC (Open-Source Technology Center) albeit with not nearly as many developers nor as many original open-source projects brought up by the Intel software crew. The Samsung OSG stated purpose has been to "enhance key open source projects through upstream contributions and active involvement with open source foundations." Samsung OSG has contributed very heavily to the development of Wayland as well as some X.Org components, Cairo, Enlightenment EFL, the LLVM Clang compiler, GStreamer, FFmpeg, the Linux kernel, and other related code-bases that helped benefit Samsung's open-source/Linux needs across their wide portfolio of products from smart watches to refrigerators.
Managing an open source project appears to be difficult enough. Try having two masters one in the open source project community and one in the company that writes your pay checks. I think maybe open source is best when companies just contribute money to the projects and let the projects themselves figure out how to distribute money to whomever is providing the most value.
The exception I could see would be when a company itself controls the open source project and is merely contributing the source code back to the community because of the terms of the license.
Somewhere in the middle, it seems that letting your employees contribute to open source as a small fraction of their time would seem to work. Kinda in the same way that in some industries, publishing to technical, scientific or business journals is normal and important.
Overall, just need to make sure the value flows make sense and are sustainable for the company, the employees and the open source projects.
The problem is most of the Open Source Teams are mostly all technical folks. Who really suck at explaining their value to their company, especially as they are sharing their hard work for free to their competitors. So they are considered a cost center vs a profit center.
What they need are some sales people to really boost their value to higher management.
Explaining how they are leading the industry and forcing other to just follow, and by being strong in the Open Source community you push your standards downward, vs hoping for the best and having to reword some of your ideas because someone else had won the standard war.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
And the proof of this is where?
And the proof of this is where?
Why on the blackmailers proof wall, of course, where all blackmailers post handy proof of their activities, in order to settle internet debates!
The sad truth about business.
Profitability isn't enough.
If you have 2 products one makes $0.02 profit per unit while the other one makes $0.0199 profit per unit, and they take the same amount of resources to produce. The company will drop the $0.0199 product and move the money for the resources to make this to produce more of the $0.02 product.
Now some companies with longer term planning, may keep the $0.0199 product in case of a problem where the $0.02 product no longer sells, so they will still have feet in the game, but often there isn't that much a threat of that happening so they will just sell more of the higher profit item.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
For fifteen years I was involved in contributing to the open source software my company used. For three years after that my job was pretty much nothing but contributing to open source, and some level 3 support for the open source software.
Here's how it workes for me. My organization wanted feature A to work better, and they wanted to add feature B. They needed bug X fixed in the open source software. I fixed the bugs that bugged them, and added or improved the features my employer wanted. It worked very well for my employer and I for the project.
One example was a RAID bug in the Linux kernel. A specific configuration stacking LVM with snapshots on top of RAID in a certain way would sometimes lock up. That was the configuration my company used, so I fixed the bug. Most of the other contributors were similar - it's basically a thousand companies, schools, and other organizations cooperatively developing and maintaining the software they all use.
My organization COULD have kept my work private, but that would be costly for them because they'd be having to re-do the work now, a few years after I left. By integrating it upstream, it continues to work, and even be improved, by others in the project.
You mentioned communicating the value. That was my main communication - less than half the cost of software is the initial development. Maintenance, including keeping documentation and tests up to date, is over half the cost. Why would we double our costs by maintaining our own version of the kernel, or our own LMS, when the project members would rather maintain those features and fixes FOR us, and all we have to do is submit a pull request? The project even provided multiple levels of peer review, language translation, and documentation written for free. It's much cheaper and more effective for us to cooperate.
This is my bad guys. It made the mistake of suggesting we standardize on using either Vi or Emacs and management thought it was a great idea. By the end of the day, the mail server was crawling and someone lost their shit and destroyed all the servers when management chose Vi because "Emacs has everything but a good text editor". #CautionaryTale
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
It's a script that automatically posts that on every article. The writer probably doesn't believe it, they're just hoping that the old adage about repeating stuff is true.
They hope that if they brainwash enough people into believing their hero was defiled, eventually it'll trigger violence. They aren't for or against any cause, they want to see nominally innocent people kill actually innocent people for a fictional reason. The plotline for Battle Royale and Hunger Games, and the basis for all extremist propaganda.
The key is, none of those actually behind such efforts believed in them. They're cynical and manipulate. Real-life examples of the fictional "Talented Mr Ripley" or the equally fictional but rather more twisted Sir Humphrey Appleby. Truth is unimportant, only effect, to such people.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'll have to install debian or netbsd on my refrigerator now.
As long as I can run doom on it... /s
When SGI got involved in open source, they contributed:
And other open source work included:
Samba for IRIX (Windows® / Unix® Interoperability)
ob1 (Sample Implementation of a Trusted Operating System)
Now, let's look at these projects. There's a lot there. Some wholly internal, some collaborative. Some succeeded, some failed dismally.
I can see no obvious relationship between who controlled it and success, scale of project and success, or any other parameters and success. It seems to have been fairly random.
If anyone wants to go through and note which ones were abandoned, which ones absorbed and which ones succeeded, that would be great. Pointless, as I'm probably the only one interested, but great.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
IBM - I can't find their development group, think it shut down.
SGI - Whole business shut down
HP - Their development group is AWOL. Since they own SGI, SGI's OSS is AWOL too
BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensourc... - Still there but Dirac is missing
NASA isn't a business and their open source is horrible.
So really, although open source has a lot of followers in companies, that doesn't extend to management.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
For the working programmer, it's becoming ever more dangerous to work on FOSS on the side, you never know when you might trigger a blue hair who will whip up a Social Terrorist mob that will cost you your job and your career as it currently exists (not that it's going to last much past age 35 or so, unless you, oh, develop a major reputation with FOSS, which other's can see vs. whatever proprietary or in-house software not really relevant to the rest of the world that most of us end up working on).
I'm retired and anti-fragile, so I can more safely play the game, but even them, I'm building a new persona on the Internet to decrease the danger to the projects I will be contributing to. Which are radically changing right now, with Linux falling in every way possible, systemd and Linus' surrender book ending that, userland and kernel, and now IBM buying Red Hat. OpenBSD is turning out to be delightful to someone who cut his teeth on V6-7 and BSD 2.x.
But if you're currently in the job market? Not only would you have to maintain perfect OPSEC, you won't be able to build your reputation and enhance your career prospects if you hide your True Name. The risk/reward balance is decidedly turning negative, and this is going to have implications for FOSS as more and more innocents get wacked and more and more normal programmers realize that the rules of the game have changed.
It's generally in their best interest to cooperate, true. It significantly reduces their costs.
Perhaps not knowing this, companies DO in fact regularly do exactly what the GPL seeks to prevent - even violating the license in so doing.
It is helpful to set up the overall system such that a self-interested rational actor does things that are good for the society. That's because frequently people do the rational thing. For example, if an economic system rewards with peofit those who make cool stuff for the rest of us, companies seeking profit will make cool things for us. Often people act rationally.
However, hang out in any gas station for fifteen minutes and watch the people buying lottery tickets. People also often act irrationally, against their self-interest.
you forgot to log out and post AC. Now you will be doxxed and then pilloried for egregious thought-crime.
Sorry friend.
I'm already on record on the net under my True Name for egregious thought crimes, heck, starting in the 1980s, but the blue hairs are powerless to to do anything more than ban me from their platforms, unless they shift to real violence, which would be a mistake in the very Red State area I live in.
No, i picked up on that -- I was being a wise-ass regarding the SJW tactics against those with opinions and views they deem 'problematic'.
And good on you; self reliance is never a bad thing.
That you can blithely ignore the undeniable fact that many have been purged by insisting "the majority" haven't yet suffered that fate, while insisting the ones who have deserved it, just shows who's side you're on. That majority keeps their heads down and plays NPC when it comes to politics, hoping the crocodile eats someone else first, which is no way to live.
We'll see, as the Social Justice terrorists tighten their grip on much if not most of FOSS, what exactly will happen, how many people will continue to contribute, or avoid it all together. Plus how we'll divide into two tribes, the slaves like you, and the free men like myself, and which produces software worth using.
"Many" is a pretty vague term. Please do provide specific amounts and their percentages of the whole FOSS developer count. I doubt your "many" make up more than a fraction of 1%.
So it's OK if only "a fraction of 1%" of the FOSS community to date has been unjustly purged? You don't think the high profile cases are already having a chilling effect, especially now that no less than Linus is one of them? That the odds are currently pretty low, as long as you're willing to be a slave to the Social Terrorists' constantly changing party line, is going to encourage people to take the risk?
Samuel Adams' best quote doesn't quite map to this situation, but it's got enough points in common to be worth repeating, the spirit of it certainly applies:
I'm retired and anti-fragile, so I can more safely play the game, but even them, I'm building a new persona on the Internet to decrease the danger to the projects I will be contributing to.
Yeah, right. You're just a slithering troll, your internet persona is the real you. You never contributed to anything in your life, let alone an open source project. You know how to type and that's just our bad luck.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.