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Commercial Open-Source Software
Paul Johnson writes "I've
written an essay on where I think the OSS movement should go. I think it needs to commercialise itself, but on its own terms not on the terms of the conventional closed-source software industry.
This essay looks at the pros and cons of both the closed and open source worlds, and then outlines a synthesis of both which I hope will have the advantages of both.
"
The only freedom of conventional open-source software which COSS modifies is the freedom to use the software without charge, and this freedom is not listed in the conditions for using the Open Source trademark.
Hm.. an interesting argument. However, I think that this is against the spirit of the OSD, as well as perhaps against clause 6. (Or maybe not... I'd like to see what others that know better think.) I think also, however, the right to use software once one has it is implicit.
This probably wouldn't work IRL. The overhead in managing this sort of thing would be killer in large projects, and people would simply rewrite a small one rather than bother paying.
Lastly, we have to ask if we wish to take a step back to a land of software haves and have-nots. This seems like just another form of somewhat less closed software to me.
I'm not sure what people's obsession is with outlining the "future of open source". I was tempted to do it at one point myself, because I'm interested in the economics of it all myself. And then I started working on my very own open source project, as well as contributing to a few others.
As a result of these experiences I've come to the conclusion that I was thinking about it all wrong. The current way of doing things has already evolved into a highly efficient means of production. Things that need to be done get done. Things that aren't important fall by the wayside. (As an aside, this is why Gates' comment about no roadmap is totally irrelevant. By not having a roadmap, we are ultimately free to do whatever needs to be done, and we aren't overcommitting ourselves to a project that nobody wants). There's no need to change the way people write software, things will happen on their own, after all that's the beauty of a market economy, is it not?
Lots of people have said something in these forums. The real economy in OSS development is the economy of time and talent. The projects that are the most interesting, or are needed the most (etc.) are the ones who will receive the most developer time. There is alot more to this, and I'm sure it'll make a good masters thesis for somebody, but to really understand open source software you have to shed all your preconceptions and intuitions about commercial software. The two are fundamentally at odds with eachother.
Commercial development corps generally see software as a product, something which can be sold for money. Open source developers see software as a tool. A tool which they can use in their lives. Of course, I'm just speaking in vague generalities here, but in general this is the case. (Case in point: how many developers of OSS applications are writing the package for money? none that I know of.)
License under GPL, LGPL or BSD. Customers are given the option to buy trading cards in support of specific developers whose exploits are listed next to the Quantity and ORDER NOW! controls.
These cards could be good for various levels of tech support (not necessarily from the developer) or just grant the user freedom from guilt (not to mention something to stick on her computer).
This would work especially well for games and be good for other IP products such as MP3 files.
To test this theory, let us conduct a small thought experiment by assuming this new theory of software creation took over all of the packages on a RedHat disk, since as the author points out the distro level is the logical point to collect the license fees from users.
:)
Now RedHat currently has 450 packages, and I doubt this scheme would be viable if the average price per package dropped much below $1. So RedHat has two choices, charge $450+distro costs+profit or move to a DIVX style scheme of charging a small base fee to get the media and then charging when you install packages from it. (Think RPM doing secure payment transactions for each installed package)
Now we start to see the problems with the proposed system. The development system is a large and complex, therefore expensive subsystem which few would pay to install. Oops! There goes your many eyeballs looking for bugs since nobody will be reading the source without an SDK to work with.
Of course precompiled standalone binaries become preferable to scripts because they would avoid paying for both the program and it's interpreter. Watch Perl, Python, etc fall in popularity in favor of less efficient to code/maintain but less expensive to execute C code.
And lets face it, it is not JUST the free speech aspect we like, the free beer is also a factor. HOw many of us have installed labs of computers from a single CD? Well kiss that goodbye, and with it one of the major competitive advantages.
Just having Freedom from Accounting is a major advantage in my book. Not having to carefully count licenses and make sure somebody hasn't installed an extra copy of Orifice somewhere. Somebody figure the economic drain imposed by all of that beancounting. Now this scheme proposes to take that beancounting to whole new levels of complexity and stupidity. Who decides whether a
hard to track down security fix is more valuable than a few feature?
Would anyone reading this want to live in the world I just described? I won't hold my breath waiting for a long stream of replies saying how happy people would be in such a world. So mark it up as yet another nice theory that made a wet smack when it ran into the Real World(TM).
Democrat delenda est
This is effectively a disincentive to benefit from the use of software, no? Or perhaps, to only get as much benefit out as one's budget will allow? Surely not an equasion for rising social wealth and productivity...
Interestingly, COSS betrays a particular concern: how to maximize payment for software in a open source environment. Now in a sense, that seems reasonable. People should get paid for their work. But I can't help but see it as an attempt to impose capitalist values in a place where, if we're honest about it, they are few people's first concern.
Why do people feel so uncomfortable with the way free software has developed up to this point? Has it been such a failure?
Perhaps Mr. Johnson should consider another aspect of evolutionary biology and psychology, mutual aid. Namely, evolution also favors the trait of cooperation. This can be read in terms of individual benefit, though I think that is a misreading. Selective pressures favor indivduals who look out for the health of the group -- not because they are 'rewarded' with reproduction precisely, but because their group survives better, and thus their progeny.
Capitalism tends to punish this survival trait -- as a system, its laws favor privatization, competition, and the rights of property over the rights of people. (If that sounds inflamatory, take a pill.) But nonetheless this trait is with us: we enjoy working with other people on common projects for its own sake. Why did this become a force (and a threat?) in software? I suspect it's because of low barriers to entry in programming, especially thanks to the internet. Compare the costs of developing and distributing a breakfast cereal, say, versus a piece of software. Orders of magnitude, really.
COSS strikes me most as the well intentioned work of a missionary out to save the decent but provincial natives. The relation between OSS, Free, and Commercial software is complicated and still in need of theorizing -- but a plan to commodify respect and community is not the answer. Who'd have thought that a bunch of hackers working on software together would have tweeked so many?
I must say this is actually one of the more intelligently written commentaries I've seen on slashdot. I was under the impression that OSS followers were illiterate. :)
:)
First off, I believe the economic analysis of the commercial software economy is fundamentally flawed. It does not take into account the funding of software failures. i.e. software that obviously cost something to build but yields no return on investment. For example Microsoft Bob.
Most software companies that I'm aware of create several bombs for each successful product.
It also doesn't take into account recurring costs of supporting the software base, marketing, sales, and other infrastructure.
In terms of the analysis on why companies pay for software even though they could copy it for free.
Two things here. Well first of all, the threat of being sued for copyright infringement is strong. But second, the capitalist economy recognizes the value given by the software and pays for that to encourage the development of other products. That is, it is in the best self-interest of the capitalist economy to help it's neighbors prosper.
Really it's not a question of being able to easily copy the product. If the source were available for the product, the fear is not that you could copy the software more easily.
The fear is that Group B would be able to look at the source and go "Ah ha! So that's how they did it." and then write their own product which does the same thing. And of course since they didn't have to pay some genius to figure out how to do that, they can charge half the price.
In terms of making OSS commercially viable. The people who are most vocal within the OSS community prevent this. Most persons who are using Linux and other OSS pieces are not doing so because they are good software. They are using them because it was "Free", as in "Free Beer".
College students have long complained about the price of software. I know, I used to do the same thing. We also used to complain about the price of beer.
I remember thinking of schemes like this when I first came across the idea of Free Software. I've been thinking about it ever since (about 14 years) and have concluded that they won't work. Given that I make my living out of supporting Free Software, this is not simply an intellectual exercise for me.
The problem is that people are generally not motivated to write good software by money. There is quite a body of evidence that offering monetary incentives to programmers tends to reduce quality, as the programmers start putting effort into working the system, rather than coding. Obviously, people are paid to code, but the money is rarely the direct motivation for doing a good job.
He does touch on one of the primary motivations for commercial programmers contributing to Free Software, which is that it is often cheaper to add the features you want to an existing Free program, than to write, or buy something else.
Anyway, an interesting article, but it's fundamentally flawed in its assumption that COSS falls under the wing of Free Software.
Clause 6 of the DFSG (a.k.a. OSD) prohibits licenses that discriminate against specific fields of endeavour (such as making money, for example).
Even if that were not the case, DFSG compliant licenses must allow derived works (clause 2) which would mean that you could derive a work which differed only in the person to whom the money should be sent, which would instantly destroy the structure he's trying to build.
His ideas also seem to fall foul of the fact that you can do what the hell you like with legally obtained software, so the ``are you using it enough to pay for it ?'' stuff might be interesting to enforce, and certainly wouldn't result in a DFSG license.
On the subject of allocating points, I'd be stunned if anyone could come up with a scheme that would appropriately reward someone that spends six months tracking down an obscure (but serious) bug (say an intermittent networking bug).
Say you allocate 5 points (it's only bug fix, after all) and the contributor says ``that's not enough, I spent six months finding that bug!'' --- You end up with all the silliness of having to do a clean-room reimplementation of the fix ? Oh dear, oh dear.
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
It's difficult for many people to comprehend the meaning of free software. It took me ages to explain to people that it wasn't illegal to sell Linux and that free meant freedom of choice.
People instantly think of freedom in terms of money because that's what drives most people.
There's a lot of greedy people out there who just want to make more and more money without doing any good.
The same thing happens with the word open - if it's open you can get it free of charge.
But in reality free is free! If you have the freedom to do what you like with software you have the freedom to give it away free. So truely free software will always mean you'll also be able to get it free of charge somewhere.
To make money out of free software you need to add value to the package. Either as support or documentation. I know coders will say - I DON'T WANT TO WRITE DOCUMENTATION and many coders can't write decent documentation anyway. So as a one man operation you probably can't make much or anything out of open source. But in the bigger picture companies like RedHat are doing just fine and are employing some of the key coders although most are still volunteers.
For most people open source will just remain a hobby for their spare time and people can be motivated by the fact they can improve a product to suit their needs or if they are a major contributer in a successful product it'll look good on their CV. Open Source has beewn successful in the past and do we really need to try and change a winning formula?
--
Hiro Protagonist did, at least until he crashed the Mafia's car into that empty swimming pool and had to change jobs -- and he turned to pizza delivery as a welcome change from hacking, when that proved too boring.
So there. Neeners.
Open-source and closed-source software can and should continue to co-exist. I have supported my work on open-source software for the past 5 years by writing closed-source. I will continue to write closed-source to support my GPL and LGPL work. I don't want or need a job working on open-source software, I have a better job now.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
OK, guys, write one big project using a direct revenue capture scheme. Make it work. Show us that nobody got hurt in the process. Explain why it's never happened up until now. Then I might believe a little more.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
The trouble with initiatives like COSS is that they fail to recognize that there are forces at work other than those described on the GNU website alone. Richard Stallman has been so consistent in his statements across many, many years that we believe him unreservedly when he uses the phrase "free as in free speech, not as in free beer". However, what almost nobody talks about is that practice in the community has not followed FSF theory in this area in any but the most infinitesimal of ways.
Let's not delude ourselves. Yes, the community is underpinned by software that is free as in free speech, but effectively all of this is also gratis. Furthermore, the mere mention of money always raises a sour taste in the mouths and writings of many, and I do *not* mean just those that confuse the two types of freedom. We see this on Slashdot time and again.
Why this is so I don't know. Perhaps gratis software is perceived as conveying more freedom. Perhaps it is that paying for software limits the number of users and hence is an a priori barrier on the freedom to join the user community --- surely a severe restriction of one's freedom. Perhaps people are just cheapskates, or maybe poverty among computer users is more widespread than is acknowledged. Or maybe it is much more complicated than that, because many seem willing to pay for distribution and/or support costs but still shy away from paying for the software itself. It's not necessarily a simple, black and white economic situation.
Whatever the reason, whatever the explicit claims, there is no doubt that the implicit effect is there, like a slow but massive undercurrent that is impossible to resist. Free software is promoting gratis software, at least in the hearts of the members of the community, and that meme has been extraordinarily successful.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I know about man (duh).. but like others noted it's notoriously out of date. However it USUALLY contains info not found in the readme. For example, check the various documentation that ships with X-MAME... at times the man and .txt contradict one another when it comes to setting variables.
.gz to compress, but the idea itself deserves merit. I don't assume it's a priority in Linus' eyes, which is too bad because a different group of people could be brought on board.
Microsoft's HTML Help really looks nice, with the added benefit of not being difficult to author. I say this with some reservations because I don't know how open their format ("compiled HTML") is. Certainly they wouldn't use something like
yes, I know about man2html...
>However there is a problem. Once the investment
>in the software has been made the copies are
>virtually free. Anyone else could therefore
>produce copies without paying the original
>authors. This would prevent the authors from
>recouping the cost of production. This is an
>example of market failure, and the solution is
>one of the earliest forms of government
>intervention in the free market. It is the body
>of law known as "intellectual property", or IP.
Oddly enough, IP is a also a maket failure. Consider:
It is assumed that all products have a marginal cost; an assumption that is false for software. The cost to manufacture another unit starts at zero and stays there. Market value is largely determined by marginal cost. As units are sold, the market value of software dimishes toward zero. Yet, the IP laws allow software vendors to continue charging hundreds or thousands of times the market value of their product. This is a blatant market failure.
Information as a product doesn't fit into Capitalism at all. IP always causes market failure, or requires huge government controls. Data need to be handled under a different set of rules. The best candidate I've seen to fill that role is Free Software, without any attempts to mix it with Capitalism.
-- Out of cheese error! Redo from start.
This is a midpoint between commercial software and OSS. Essentially you're trying to get the benefits (money) of commercial software in exchange for the rapid development model of OSS. Inevitably the movement will slide down that slippery slope right back to where we were before - heavily licensed software protected by obtuse patents and a incredibly huge beurocracy.
Your primary point of this article was that it does not cost money to distribute software. So once the r&d has been invested in the creation of the product.. distribution is unlimited and costs nothing! This leads to the conclusion that if OSS can produce software for free(dollars, not time here)... and distribute it for free, any such mutation will fail in the long-term.
OSS is indeed a gift culture, but it isn't as noble as you're portraying it - we do expect something in return. We expect our freedom.
--
There are many possible frameworks for charging, most of which have also been tried by the closed-source software companies. For example:
I will never use any software that nickles and dimes me. I do not want any company or person knowing what software I use when. Also, as you mention, the value of a piece of software is different for each person. There are 400 individual software packages included in RedHat's distribution. What is the value to me of a single invocation of perl? Small. Very small.
Also, in the course of writing a perl script I will execute perl tens, hundreds, even thousands of times in testing it. What is the value of a single one of those perl executions? Zero. But much good may be derived from it if I develop a useful script. Development tools must not be charged for.
In implementation, your charging scheme looks like taxation. There are lots of good reasons that people hate taxation.
Open Source Software already has a problem with fragmentation. Human politics leads to disagreements, which leads to software splits (Net/Open)BSD, egcs/gcc, emacs/xemacs/lucid emacs, etc. By making it economically favorable for a contributor to grab the source and run, you make it favorable for the contributor to fragment the project. This is not a Good Thing(tm) IMHO.
In summary, it looks like an interesting idea, but totally unimplementable. You would have to create a central authority to handle "points", and this is wide open to fraud. I think one of the major strengths of Open Source is that it is economically free (beer). You would massively reduce the number of potential contributors to a project if now you must pay to hack it. "Many eyeballs" depends on a minimization of the effort involved in looking at the code. Once money is involved, you place a large stubling block in front of any potential set of eyeballs.
-- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
I think you bring up a some good points here, most especially this one:
Do you really believe that there are enough talented developers in every possible niche in all aspects of each software package to meet those various needs.
This is something I have thought about from time to time, although in a different context. Let's face it: there are a finite number of developers in the world (although I think that the Internet probably greatly boosts growth in the developer population), each with a finite amount of time and energy he/she can devote.
Whenever I hear about a new open source (or potentially open-source) project, I think, "That's nice. I hope there are still developers left to work on it".
With respect to your other points:
I think you misunderstand what is meant by a gift economy. I think that most developers are motivated by such things as the desire for respect or prestige, etc.. But your respect in this culture is proportional to the size and/or quality of your contribution to the culture. That's really all that's meant by a 'gift culture'. And the gift part must be important, because you can get prestige and the sense of working on something big on a closed-source project, as well.
And I don't think we need worry about running out of interesting things to work on; I think that the environment in which an OS lives changes quickly enough that there will always be interesting probelms to solve. An OS is an ever-evolving thing.
Chris Malek
Developers might post notes on their websites, telling which cards they are looking for. If I'm doing a lot of Python work, I might mention that I'll give a large chunk of tech support in exchange for a GvR card.
Part of the appeal of this idea is that it's decentralized; one or two developers can start issuing cards without waiting for anybody else to do so. In the absence of a busy marketplace of card-trading, cards simply represent deferred tech support.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Despite the length and convoluted nature of this article, it's easy to figure out that what the writer suggests is a bad idea.
The system he proposes cannot be implemented. How would one determine what constituted a "use for value" and what the degree of one's gain is? I gain something even if I just run a piece of software once and decide it's not worth using--the knowledge that whatever I'm using is better than everything else I've seen for what I want to do. Another example: what if I examine the source code for something and learn a skill that I use a year later to make a million dollars? How much do I pay, and when? Or this: I run a company and use a "COSS" product. I make money in the short run, but it's eventally found that using that software introduced fundamental flaws into my product; I lose money, and eventually go out of business. Do I pay? I'm sure people can think of myriad other examples on their own.
Then there's the monitoring. This is already infeasable because of the problems determining the value of using software. Add to this the problem of tracking users at all: what if someone doesn't have a 'net connection? How do you keep tabs on this person's use? (Not to mention the fact that this scheme could probably be cracked by a "m4|) pH4t h4X0R" in no time flat.)
A theory is only good if one can apply it, to one's benefit. These ideas would only make a laughingstock of whoever tried putting them into practice. Open source deserves better.
The author's analysis of capitalism made a few major errors that are unfortunately all too common.
First and foremost, capitalism is not founded on "the greatest good for the greatest number". Who is "the greatest number"? What is its "good"? Various political/economic systems have answered with "the People", "the Nation", "the followers of God", or "the Race". In practice, this approach to anything always results in the rights of individuals being trampled by whatever gang happens to be in power at the time. A "group", as such, does not exit--the concept is just an easy way to think about a collection of individuals.
Capitalism is the social system based on the recognition of individual rights, specifically the rights to life, liberty, and property, where all property is privately owned. (Pursuing happiness is, in practice, impossible without these.) Practially speaking, this means that the government acts only to protect its citizens from physical force and its derivatives (e.g. fraud), staying out of the realm of economics. In personal interactions, this means that men must act on the principle of trading the best they can offer with the best that others can offer, which is exactly what the hacker culture does. It is not a "gift culture". People do not get respect simply for giving their work away, but by providing something that other hackers find useful or interesting. (Really, how much "props" do we give to the five thousand authors of open source text editors? I thought so.)
Rather than being antithetical to capitalism, hacker culture is more an exponent of it than most businesses, who clamor for more government intervention to destroy their competitors or make entry into markets virtually impossible. Hacker culture rewards the best--those with intelligence and skill. Dismissing political pull of any sort, hackers insist on trading value for value, which may take the form of respect, money, or a better piece of software. Despite the noise, good hackers are not altruists--they gain a very selfish value from their work: joy. Those who don't, don't remain hackers for very long, or don't get very good at it.
It's time we got past the FUD surrounding capitalism and recognize what it really is--the best system under which to write great software. For references, see capitalism.net, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics by George Reisman, and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand.
Think about it: The Linux kernel and tools look like they do because someone needed them to. Unlike proprietary software, the unused parts of the Linux kernel get selected out, causing much greater efficiency. In the closed-source market, the company might add something no one needs (animated titlebars, anyone?), taking developers away from other, more important functions (networking). In open systems, developers act as the environmental forces shaping the evolved entity into the state it needs to be in.
This is why OSS works so well and closed systems do not: response to market forces.
Mike
--
Mike
--
"Wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?"
The author makes a detour into evolutionary psychology to attempt to explain gift cultures. Here he makes the usual mistake of thinking that all human behaviour can be explained with reference to reproduction. This is implausible on the face of it, as can be seen by the existence of strict homosexuals and monasteries. Humans, conscious thinking beings, have a much wider range of motivations than the simple desire to reproduce.
Even in the terms of evolutionary psychology, the reasoning is suspect. The sexual selection strategy of peacocks is indeed interesting and instructive (although I'll note that Darwin anticipated sexual selection strategies, so the comment that the peacocks had not read the Origin of Species misstates Darwin's understanding of the idea he invented). However, when it comes to the example of the hunter (presumed to be male), it's hardly obvious that women are selecting good hunters on the basis of respect. A good hunter can do well for the very obvious reason that he is a good hunter, quite apart from the benefits of respect. Women might prefer to have children with such a hunter simply because those children would in turn be good hunters and would therefore do well, to say nothing of the benefits of having a good hunter caring for the children. Even if we buy into the notion that reproduction is the main determinant of human behaviour, this example gives very little reason to think that respect is a prim
The author argues that selection for respect helped lead to potlatch cultures. Potlatch cultures developed in an unusual area with a large amount of resources available for easy gathering. It's interesting to note that the potlatch cultures did not develop traditional agriculture, but were nevertheless able to create large settled communities, simply because the natural resources were so abundant.
Just as we in the U.S. prefer to elect a president who keeps the economy running strong, the potlatch culture villages preferred leaders who were able to supply their needs well. In a culture of abundance, it became possible for a leader to demonstrate that ability by showing that he had a super-abundance--so much stuff that he had no need for it, and could actually destroy it and still be well off. Clearly somebody that well off would be a good supplier.
Of course, that explanation is just as simple-minded as the one based on evolutionary psychology. In reality, people's motivations are complex, and can not be so easily analyzed. The point is that there is no need to refer human actions back to reproductive strategies; other explanations serve just as well.
I think one of the key issues that many people are working on when they try to create "futures" for open source is this: Currently, a very large portion of open source software is written by people that have jobs writing (other) commercial software. Why? Because they need to eat. Not everyone can live off their fame. (RMS) Even Linus has a real job... If open source is the solution to all of the world's software problems, then eventually (to listen to some people here) all projects will be open source. Who then pays the programmers? I realize that there are other business models which can alleviate that strain (Cygnus, RedHat, etc...) but I'm still not convinced that it will be enough. I'd like to see someone provide a feasible economic model of how the entire world could operate on open source and still keep its programmers fed and clothed.
-Brian
Commercial Open Source Software (COSS) would entail a commercial software vendor selling software licenses the same way they do now; however, they would also sell copies of the source code to their product. All users would still be required to pay the run-time license fee for the product, but modified versions of the software could be distributed (so long as the end users paid the license fee).
In addition, the author suggests that contributors to the source code might be paid for their contributions, and suggests a compensation scheme based on "contribution points." The company essentially outlines how many points a person gets for a contribution, (ie 1pt for a minor bug fix, 2pt for a minor/simple feature, etc.) and in return for contribution points, the contributor receives some revenue. The author suggests that these points should not be tradeable, to avoid alienation from the product and investment scams. Even if contribution points aren't a good way to pay contributors, the author still maintains that some mechanism should be provided for doing so.
My take on this is that the argument for selling your source is excellent. Many people believe that if anyone has a copy of a commercial vendor's source code then they will be unable to charge for it. This is pretty obviously wrong; we've seen a variety of cases where a sneaky hacker has busted in and liberated the source code to a variety of products, (the Quake source code was liberated in this way,) but the products made money anyway. This suggests to me that id could have easily have been distributing the source code to Quake, in c, and would not have suffered for it.
In addition, the author notes that the most expensive software is used by companies in the course of business. Managers who pay for software licenses take that payment out of their budgets; if they don't, they run the risk of employees blowing the whistle on a company when they see that the company endorses software piracy. This makes companies somewhat easier to monitor for software piracy.
Finally, many people want a packaged product, with manuals, tech support, and a pretty box; this can generally only be provided by buying a legal copy of the software.
Selling the source is a great idea, but what about contributors? Well, it's hard to tell whether and how contributors should be paid for contributions. In many cases, I think we'll find that contribution schemes like the one listed above will be unnecessary. It's unlikely that someone will decide to fix a bug in someone else's software in exchange for the meager sum that a company is likely to provide for that service. Many coders will be unwilling to contribute to COSS on the principle that it isn't Free. Coders still might do so for the prestige value, however; they might also do so if they get frustrated with a bug in the software and decide to go in and fix it themselves. So it seems to me that paying contributors won't add much to the contribution pool, and that contributors will still contribute source anyway.
The author's contribution scheme is especially flawed, IMO, because it could easily lead to feature bloat as programmers decide to code up lots and lots of minor features to try to get points. I also disagree with the author's claim that the points should not be made tradeable: it's hard to tell what would prevent the contributors from making contracts with others to accept a certain sum of money now in exchange for transferring all further contribution revenue to the buyer. While the author points out that trading leads to a whole body of rule/lawmakers who regulate investments, this is only another mark against contribution points.
In sum, COSS is a good idea. Giving contribution points in exchange for contributions probably isn't a good idea. However, some other mechanism of contribution might work, and might be necessary to develop a large body of programmers working on the project.
-Dan
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
RMS didn't found the FSF because of people who could not afford software. Free software is *not* about price - it's about freedom. The author wants to charge money for software (which is fine), but he wants to do so at the expense of freedom. This is not 'Commercial Open-Source Software' - it's proprietary software.
Cygnus is a good example of a commercial free software company. They make their money developing and selling GPLed software.
The more I read stuff, the more I find that 'open source' is meaning 'free of charge' rather than anything else. I suppose this is even partly intentional, to hide any freedom issues. Amusing how 'open source' was supposedly coined to avoid this specific meaning, when this is the only meaning ESR presents.
This article deserves more than a casual read. I intend to print and study it in some detail. Some questions occurred to me as I went through it,
Who contributes value, who receives value, and who pays for it dont seem to me obvious at all.
The article contains the premise that some people want or need to get paid for contributing to open software. Anyone know how many of the principle contibutors to oss fall into one of these groups? I don't know.
Is peer regard or respect the primary pay for writing oss software? I'd rate the satisfaction I get from coding for its own sake way higher than the money I receive at my day job or the peer respect I get. But I'm mostly a user and evangelizer of oss (also my interests tend to be so arcane and the results so incomplete I can't imagine anyone else being interested) so maybe I'm way atypical. I think gift culture is a simplistic explanation for a more complex reality.
What if the primary beneficiary of oss software is the society as a whole? If the outcome of all this is that oss enables an economy that eliminates scarcity altogether and makes everyone so rich they have major economic incentive not to rock the boat by going off on tribal crusades would that justify the inefficiencies in government subsidy? What level of lesser benefit would justify subsidy?
Cool article - made me think. Isn't it fun to live on the bleeding edge of change and have issues like these to puzzle over?
wayne
Getting the job done and getting paid is a good enough reward. The question is how to achieve it. Here's a suggestion:
For the time being, let's divide programmers in two groups:
- The Rock&Roll stars
- The dentists
The Rock&Roll stars want to create a hit and strike gold. If they don't make it, they stay unknown and poor. If they do, their wealth increases by orders of magnitude.
The dentists just do their job, day after day. However good a job they did for one customer, they still have to start from scratch in the next one's mouth. Of course, as they go along, they gather experience and may be able to process more clients in one day, but not by orders of magnitude.
I'd say the Rock&Roll star depends on the existence of closed software to work.
And the dentist could do very well in an open software paradigm.
It depends what is the profile of most programmers: a teenage wonder kid with no responsibilities or a skilled adult in a particular trade.
I have been creating open source software for customers for the last fifteen years and in all that time, not one of my customers ever tried to understand my source code, let alone try to learn how to code himself.
They pay me by the hour to be able to focus on their own job instead of trying to learn of to make the damn thing work.
So, on one side, you have end users and on the other, you have technicians.
One side pays the other to spend time solving problems. That's pretty much in line with the idea of capitalism. And it takes care of feeding the programmers.
Now forget the end user one moment and focus on the programmers.
To do their work, they need software tools. They have a choice between paying for a closed tool kit or an open one.
In my opinion, it is very easy to demonstrate that it makes much more economic sense for each individual programmer to share the tools than to sell it to each other.
For each hour you put in maintaining the common software pool, you get many orders of magnitude more code back.
While when you spend one hour's worth of salary on a closed source software tool, you get a few dollars worth of software and that's it.
So what I'm saying is that the economic model under which Open Source software makes economic sense is one where most programmers are not confined within the glass walls of an ivory tower, but are supported by a network of paying customers.
This may help bridge the gap between programmers who give away their work of love for the benefit of mankind and the volunters who also give away their time for the benefit of mankind in non-profit organisations (generally working in a Windows environment).
--- Whatever takes you through the night...