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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.
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.
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)
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.