The Complicated Economy of Open Source Software (vice.com)

An excerpt from a report, which looks at the complicated business of funding open source software development: On the surface, the open source software community has never been better. Companies and governments are adopting open source software at rates that would've been unfathomable 20 years ago, and a whole new generation of programmers are cutting their teeth on developing software in plain sight and making it freely available for anyone to use. Go a little deeper, however, and the cracks start to show. The ascendancy of open source has placed a mounting burden on the maintainers of popular software, who now handle more bug reports, feature requests, code reviews, and code commits than ever before.

At the same time, open source developers must also deal with an influx of corporate users who are unfamiliar with community norms when it comes to producing and consuming open source software. This leads to developer burnout and a growing feeling of resentment toward the companies that rely on free labor to produce software that is folded into products and sold back to consumers for huge profits. From this perspective, Heartbleed wasn't an isolated example of developer burnout and lack of funding, but an outgrowth of a systemic disease that had been festering in the open source software community for years. Identifying the symptoms and causes of this disease was the easy part; finding a cure is more difficult. Further reading: How Does Heartbleed Alter the 'Open Source Is Safer' Discussion?

Comments

As JWZ famously said

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is only free if your time has no value

This applies to many other things in life and in software.

Best regards.

Wtf is wrong with developers

[reanjr]

"I thank you for your feedback, but I wanted to let you know this project is not actively maintained. This is a hobby project for which I do not get paid, and unfortunately I do not have the time to address all the feedback it receives. If you'd like to contact me about paid support or services, please send an email to..."

Setup an autoresponder. Burnout is stupid.

OSS and corporate misunderstandings go both ways

[Anonymous Coward]

The summary mentions that the corporate world doesn't understand the OSS norms. Just as likely, in my opinion, the OSS volunteers don't have a good understanding of the corporate participants. We all appreciate OSS volunteers and the wonderful software they create. That said, it should be no surprise to anyone, least of which the person who put the license on the software, that corporations are going to do anything lawful they can to make money. If that means creating terrible patches and not integrating with the flow of the OSS project itself, they may do that. Those engineers at those companies are not the ones profiting in most cases. They are merely being asked to do more with less, as that seems to be the trend. The choice may be to attempt to get changes harmonized with the community or just publish whatever they come up with at the end. I suspect that there's a latent annoyance about this particular thing coming from the OSS volunteers. But, if you have given the company this right in the license (to use the software as long as changes are published), you can't be surprised that they're not doing a good job of helping you merge them into the mainline. They're doing the least they can get away with. To tie it all together, I think it's no coincidence that one of the largest, most successful OSS projects, Linux, was driven by a man who literally had no shame about giving the middle finger to an uncooperative company. (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/linus-torvalds-says-f-k-you-to-nvidia/). He understands the dance, and it's not an easy one. These companies will walk all over you. Let's not accidentally encourage naivety and call it a virtue.

Re: And I want a pony...

[stoborrobots]

Contributions are only expected in proportion to demand for more work.

If millions of users take the project as it is, use it in its current form, possibly tweak it for themselves, take it apart, add new features for their own use, or do whatever they want with it within the license terms, that's fine - no contribution required. (Although it is always appreciated!)

However, if users start demanding new features, and customizations, and bug fixes, and support requests, on strict timelines, without offering anything back in return for their heightened expectations, that is when the project team starts to expect the users to contribute to the community beyond just issuing demands.

It is unreasonable for the users to expect and demand that the project team do work for the users benefit for free with no contribution back from those users to the community.