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Getting Paid to Write Open Source Code

Posted by Hemos on from the and-then-you-cash-the-check dept.

Thanks to Norm J for pointing out the recent Doc Searls' article that talks about the growing number of ways to earn money while writing open Source code. This article is especially interesting in light of CoSource and SourceXChange. So, buckle down, and have fun-get paid to do what you love.

5 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Prevention of Dissenters? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5

    The article, as far as I could tell, did not mention dissention. What if a developer produces crap, or nothing at all? He may not get paid, but now H-P or whomever is three months behind where they wanted to be. If an H-P programmer doesn't work, he gets a pink piece of paper...

    The enforcement cannot be a strongarm contract -- individual developers do not have personal attorneys, and aren't willing to risk a lawsuit for $500 - $5000.

    How do coSource, etc. handle enforcement on the development side?

  2. Read. Understand. Post. by gavinhall · · Score: 5

    Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    I don't doubt that you'll see proprietary companies touting the openness of their source code if you aren't already.

    And yes, "Open Source" is a buzzword.

    And yes, I also hate free (beer) software disguised as Free (speech) software.

    BUT, you seem to be confused on number of issues.

    First, Netscape is not the only corporation to have opened its code. Cygnus, IBM, Sendmail Inc and many others have always or recently been open.

    Second, your only objection to sourceXchange and CoSource seems to be that the developer makes money. What's wrong with that? No one, not even RMS, objects to developers getting paid to do what they love. The objection is proprietary "standards", secret source code and lack of Freedom.

    As for quality getting lost: What exactly do you feel will lose quality? Linux? These companies aren't hiring Linux developers, they are hiring developers for unrelated, Open Source software. And even if some of them wanted things like device drivers or kernel mods, they'd have to pass Linus to be official anyway.
    --
    "Please remember that how you say something is often more important than what you say." - Rob Malda

  3. Interesting... by Millennium · · Score: 5

    Here's the thing. People always use the "programmers will starve" argument against Open-Source and moving the whole industry in that direction. The thing is, they're half right. If the Open-Source model becomes the standard for the industry, those programmers who cannot adapt to it will either lose their jobs or have to take severe pay cuts.

    However, there is still big money to be made. Why? Here's the deal: Open-Source has many advantages. The biggest advantage is that maintenance turnaround times are extremely high. However, Open-Source does have one flaw: initial development time, be it for a piece of software or even just a major feature being added to a piece of software, is very slow.

    And that is where the money is to be made.

    Why? Well, Open-Source proponents say that the initial development time does not matter. However, they're wrong: it matters. A great deal. People outside the industry care about it even if people in the industry don't. This isn't a bad thing, though, because that's where the money comes in. Imagine a company which writes only Open-Source software. Of course, you have the idea of selling support and such, but let's face it, that alone is not going to pay all the bills. It'll sustain the tech support division but it won't fund programming, especially not on completely new projects. However, what happens when that company also does consulting? That is, it is hired by others to write completely new Open-Source software or add large new features to existing software.

    Why would people do this? Individuals probably would not, but businesses would. Why? Because they need software now. They can't depend on waiting for features to naturally evolve, as features do in the Open-Source model; it simply takes too long (and there is no guarantee that the feature you want will evolve at all). That is where the companies come in: what they are selling still is not the software itself. What they are selling is the ability to get that software out more quickly than would otherwise happen. It's like shipping via FedEx; you can save a lot of money by using the regular mail, but FedEx will get it there much more quickly (plus they're more reliable than the postal service).

    There's money to be made in Free Software. You just have to know where to look. And ironically enough, Open-Source's only flaw is the reason you can make money from it.

  4. This isn't so new. We do both those and then some by droleary · · Score: 5

    This seems to be yet another case of Slashdot reporting old news. We at Subsume Technologies have been trying to get the boat floating in the "pay for your open source" movement since last year.

    Put quite simply, nobody seems to be eager to to give funding to projects that may potentially help a competetor, regardless of the benefits of the open source model. For some reason, it is OK to buy the same word processor as your competetor if it comes from Microsoft or some other closed-source shop, but the second you want to release the source, they think they're just giving a free ride to someone else, which doesn't sit well with them.

    We've taken pitches for software a company wants implemented, we've given pitches to companies for software they need implemented, and we've done software in advance in hopes of finding the market that will support it. In all cases, the mention of our intention to make the source open has been met with massive resistance.

    In short, it simply won't fly. The market is not yet ready to contribute to the open source movement, they are only ready to plunder the works that already exist. It will be a good five or ten years before the more clueful companies show enough benefits to topple the old model of proprietary computing.

  5. Infrastructure is good by jdzions · · Score: 5
    Speaking as an executive of a company that has paid individual developers for exactly this purpose, I'm thrilled to see an infrastructure develop to make things easier.

    Last year my company sponsored what we called a "Linux Bounty"; we identified a dozen or so Open Source applications that we wanted ported to our operating system. We put dollar amounts on each and set up some simple rules:

    1. First acceptable implementation gets paid
    2. We decide what's acceptable
    3. We'll update in real-time a list of projects for which we have received implementations
    4. Whatever copyright terms applied to the original source base applied to the submitted code
    We got a half-dozen implementations; for those which were useable, we paid. The most expensive item cost me $1000 out of my budget, and was cheap at the price.

    The biggest unanswered question about sourceXchange indeed lies in the matter of peer review. If I'm going to write a check for a few grand, I'm going to want to have some degree of trust in the technical judgement of the person or persons deciding if the submitted work meets the requirements. I expect I'm going to have to write wickedly precise requirements with respect to coding standards; things like "no compiler warnings beyond those generated by the starting source base", etc. Things that I need guaranteed if I'm going to be able to support the resulting software.

    All in all, though, I expect to be a sponsor of a variety of projects. Start small, work my way up as I gain trust in the process. I don't like the idea of starting small; it will cost me time I can ill-afford. But it's the only way to mitigate the risks involved with someone else making an accept/reject decision on my behalf.

    Jason