Sounds like *your* software wasn't open-source. Maybe that was the problem all along and why the "Arts organization" dropped you in favor of your open source company.
Are you serious? Most organizations don't care at all about whether software is open-source. They are looking for software that meets their needs.
Given two packages that perform equally well, the organization is going to make their decision based on support. And "support" doesn't mean some college student in Finland who gets on IRC at night. It means an employee or local consultant who will answer the phone, maintain the systems, and meet with the customer when needed.
The delusions under which so many open-source proponents labor is incredible. It's like a shipping clerk who convinces himself that the rest of the company is really excited about his use of recycled packing peanuts.
If a developer writes a program, and open sources it, that developer has no right to be upset when a company or individual uses that program under the terms of the open source liscense used, and does not pay for it.
I never said that a developer had a moral right to be upset. I simply said that Apple's motivation is pure capitalism. They saw a source of free labor.
If a developer wants to make a living off a product's sales that he writes, giving it away for free is pretty stupid. Now if he wants to make a living off of support, customization or maintenance for a company off of that product, maybe giving it away for free isn't so bad.
Okay, this is a separate issue. It seems pretty damned stupid to give away the source if you want to make a living off of "support, cusomization maintenance." At that point, you've given away the crown jewels. It was the one thing that guaranteed you an advantage over your competitors and made you the one with whom companies would have to negotiate. Now anyone can compete with you if they are a competent software engineer. It could be someone closer to your customer. It could be a company in India willing to do the work for $5 per hour. I think that the proprietary software model has a lot longer and stronger history of success.
Apple has contributed back to open source software that they encorporate, in many situations...
So how do those "contributions" help the code's authors pay their mortgages, buy nicer cars, save towards their retirement, or put food on the table?
Apple uses OS as a tool, to improve their product, it is open source, it was INTENDED to be able to do that, but they arn't completely ungrateful about it.
Then let's see them start handing out checks to those who wrote substantial portions of code.
Isn't that a part of what makes open source great? The fact that you can take freely available code and build your own products and ideas on top? Are big businesses not allowed to do that too?
There's no question that big businesses think that it's great, but that's why some open source projects are going with dual licenses where commercial use has a different license than non-commercial use. Many open source contributers are annoyed when some large company like Apple takes open source and sells it for a huge profit. It's fun to share with peers, but it feels like being used when some firm like Apple resells your work while not paying you a dime.
Nobody contributing to open source has to show up at Apple's campus 5 days a week and sit in a cubicle for 8 hours, etc., etc.
Right. No salary. No Apple-supplied computer. No paid vacation. No phone, cubicle, photocopy machine, no office support. No medical insurance. No long-term disability insurance. No retirement plan. No stock options.
It's not free labor. Some of the contributions to open source projects come from companies and paid programmers using code and contributing their improvements or additions back. It's shared code. Nobody is necessarily doing it for free.
If you think that "nobody" is coding on open source projects for free, you're delusional. Most companies that use open source do not pay people to write code that is contributed back. But that's not the point. To Apple, all of that is free labor. They paid nothing for the code, hence the term free. Since the code is the product of thousands of hours of labor, the labor, to Apple, is free.
Apple has been consistently feeding improvements back upstream to the two open source projects they've heavily borrowed from, FreeBSD and KHTML, in the form of no-strings-attached patches."
Whoop-dee-frigging-do!
"As a result both products have been at least to some degree improved. I don't exactly call that "no compensation".
If you went for a job interview and they promised to occasionally give you patches for your code, would you consider that to be compensation? Just how many meals can the talented open source engineers buy with free patches from Apple? How many months of mortgage will be paid with patches?
You may not call that "no compensation", but I do.
Furthermore, it's no accident that Apple has "embraced open source" because the open source movement's philosophy and criteria for license acceptance was crafted to cater to business.
Apple's use of open source is simple: They get man-years of development for which they pay nothing. They then resell a product incorporating all of the open source and don't compensate the authors in any way. This is like trying to figure out why people prefer free things. It's not rocket science. It's not philosophy. It's not Apple making a statement about the ideals of the open source community. They have found a source of free labor. It's that simple.
It's actually outsourcing taken to the next level. But instead of having programmers in India write their code for $3/hour, Apple gets the open source community to write it for $0 per hour/day/week/month/year.
I see what you're saying, but look at it this way: how much would you save later on?
How much would your competitors save later on? Capitalism is about gaining a monetary advantage over your competition. That's why software for business has traditionally been closed source and commercial.
Maybe you could even come to some sort of agreement with them to chip in equally for the project.
Now you are talking. But that's where the open source model falls apart. Everyone who does not contribute gets a monetary reward: They get the advantages of the product at their competitors' expense.
Letting the "something" go under puts you all at an economic disadvantage.
No, it keeps you all on an even footing. If given the choice of financing something that will equally benefit my firm and all of its competitors, I would not finance that thing. Suppose I paid $100,000 and my competitors paid nothing. My costs would be $100,000 greater than theirs, yet they would enjoy the same benefits, giving them an economic advantage. That $100K could have been used to hire an additial employee, to take out additional ads, etc.
You keep doing what you do best: programming/enhancing your product.
Get a friend from high school (a big mouth usually) as a partner who will be in charge of just promoting and selling your products and services.
Contract an accounting person to show up a couple days a month to do your books, and a lawyer to help you with patents in the future.
Hire some buddies, hire part-time accountants, and get a lawyer...": That sounds like the formula that lead to the failure of so many dot-coms and is a likely way to dig yourself a financial hole into which all of your savings will go.
The first thing that you need is a real business plan. It needs to be based on sound financial analysis which take into account the potential market, marketing costs, labor costs, competition, office space costs, etc. If you can't get a bank or venture capitalist to finance your company, then take advantage of their wisdom and ask for specifics as to where they saw unacceptable risks. Most of them have seen many businesses start and fail and will have a lot of insight. Don't quit your day job just because someone on the Internet told you that you would get rich selling support services for your open source project.
Before you start talking about partnerships, you need to consult an attorney and an accountant. You need to determine what kind of legal protections and tax protections are offered by various corporate arrangements. Do you want to organize as a Sub-Chapter S, Sub-Chapter C, LLC, sole proprietorship, etc? I don't know the answers, but you need to know them before diving into such a venture.
Finally, you need to try to remain objective. This software is your baby. You've invested countless hours in its creation. But you still need to step back and be realistic when evaluating its future and the competition. Looking at your product, it seems to be appeal to a rather limited audience: PalmOS users who wish to sync their handhelds with Java-enabled PCs AND who cannot use, or are dissatisfied with, the free app provided by Palm for that purpose. Sony has just announced that it is dropping out of the U.S. Palm market, leaving Palm as the only significant supplier of PalmOS handhelds. That should be a serious concern to you. What's your plan if Palm goes out of business or stops supplying handhelds to the mass market?
By making your work open source, you let your biggest competitive advantage, the fruits of your intellectual labor, slip through your fingers. Consultants who have offices closer to customers can compete with you to provide support, integration services, and development. Seven guys from India who share a one bedroom apartment and will work for $7/hour can compete with you. If your software is even reasonably well documented, competent software engineers all over the world will be able to add to it, modify it, and support it for their customers.
Your best bet is to come up with a new product, make it closed source, and get paid like the guys who sell WinZIP, WinRAR, UltraEdit, Vedit, FTP Voyager, FTP Serv-U, etc.
The alternative is to ask detailed probing questions at the interview and expect coherent answers in real time. I do not understand how this would be less stressful than a multiple choice test that was designed to be laughably easy for almost anyone.
Psychiatrists who specialize in phobias could explain it. A phobia is not a rational process.
I have hired enough people to have confidence in my ability to screen out the fakes; this was one of the few noteworthy exceptions.
It sounds like you have an acceptable failure rate then. Why risk offending many candidates when so few fakes get by you already? Do you really want your top prospect to be accept an offer from your competitor because he felt like your "test" was insulting and showed a lack of trust?
Maybe not, but you should be as selective in choosing the company as they are in choosing you. If you accept a job offer without sufficient "due dilligence", how is that any different from the employer drawing names out of hat and making an offer at random?
There's no question that there has to be "due diligence" on both sides, but what we are trying to establish is what constitutes due diligence. If the people in HR and the hiring managers say that the company offers wonderful growth opportunities, should I demand that they open up the personnel files to me so that I can check up on that claim? Of course not. I'm expected to take them at their word after a few polite questions. But you seem to advocate the company not extending the applicant the same courtesy.
It's not so much a matter of basing everything on a few bad experiences, it is more a matter of learning from mistakes. How many times do you need to repeat a bad experience before you think about ways of avoiding it next time?
It's a matter of balance. If you invest in mutual funds, one of them is probably going to drop in value some day. That doesn't mean that you pull all of your money out and put it into 1% interest savings accounts. If you hire 50 people and one of them turns out to be a "fake", you don't institute a policy that will annoy, anger, or demoralize 25 of the next 50.
Won't these costs just be forced down onto the customers? Sure, it funds Spamhaus, but why is this a good thing for a user who doesn't have to deal with spam? I get maybe one spam e-mail a day.
You're the same kind of a**hole who complains that some of his taxes are going to subsidize medical care for blind, quadrapalegic veterans. 'It doesn't help me personally, so why should I pay for it?' Talk about self-centered!
But, since you are that type of person, I have a suggestion: Your ISP should turn off all spam filtering and then force you to personally pay for all of the additional bandwidth, storage, and servers necessary to handle the load. Oh, and when other customers leave the service because they are now getting spam, your monthly bill will increase by the amount that they were paying to cover the ISP's losses.
You have an AOL address. That means that you are probably paying well over $20 per month for dial-up service. If you're so frigging concerned about the $.000034 per month that AOL might pass on to you (yes, that's the real number assuming $14,500/year divided amoung 35 million AOL subscribers), then why aren't you using any of the under-$10 ISPs out there?
Proven success, if your aim is to keep churning out products which are basically shit and full of bugs (talking about Microsoft)...{snip}Microsoft is so very afraid right now. Spreading FUD everywhere, including web forums like Slashdot.
In mentioning Microsoft (and Oracle, IBM, Symantec, etc.), I was speaking about the viability of the closed source business model, not about whether it produces superior software. I really think that you latched onto the entire Microsoft thing way too much. You hate Microsoft. We get it. But let's stick to the topic at hand.
I don't need antivirus stuff as I'm running Linux, so I'm not familiar with Symantec.
I find Symantec's antivirus software to be substandard, but running Linux is only a protection against viruses so long as Linux remains a relatively unpopular OS. If the idiots who run any attachment sent to them move to Linux, the virus writers will follow.
Seems to me that if you were running in races under the impression that you'd be given some sponsorship money, then didn't and had to starve to death for the summer, you'd probably sell your bike. Seems to me this is the same sort of thing...
The difference is that I'd get a signed contract with the sponsor before I started racing. This guy was spending his life writing software based on the belief that some company was going to donate money to him.
Anyway, chalk it up to another gulliable guy who forgot that he had to put food on the table. Someday the majority of geeks'll have this figured out, hopefully.:/
I'm sorry for him, but if you go to the web page, you will find that his requested donations consists primarily of an Amazon.com "Wish List" of items like DVDs, video games, and CDs. If I were having to borrow money to buy food, I'd lose the Amazon.com Wish List and start pushing a PayPal account.
Traditionally, this situation (in game-theoretic terms, the public good problem) is solved by the imposition of government, which compells people to take the choice that, if individually made, would be disadvantageous, but if universally made, would be advantageous.
You are talking to a left-leaning, almost socialist some would say, person and even I'm a bit put off by this. Are you suggesting that government pay companies to use open source software (such as grsecurity) in lieu of commercial offerings? Talk about a double whammy! The authors still get no compensation and the government pays companies to not purchase commercial software. If you were talking about compensating authors, that would be a different matter, but paying companies to use free software?
With software development, on the other hand, if one niche is filled (suppose we got a really great world class word processor and all the people at Microsoft that work on Word and at Corel that work on WordPerfect lost their jobs), there's *always* another to fill.
I disagree. There aren't an infinite number of niches to fill. Even of those that do exist, only a small percentage of them could economically support commercial software developers. If there is an unending supply of profitable niches to fill, why are so many software engineers unemployed?
But here goes, IBM gets most of its revenues from services. It is not alone. This is a model of doing business that works for millions of companies round the world. OSS supports that model.
If I raise vegetables and give them away, I'm sure that businesses would be happy to take the vegetables from me (by the truckload) and sell them. Thus, my labor and investment would support their business model. But that doesn't mean that "open source farming" is a viable way for me to earn a living. Sure, if you give something away, businesses will find a way to profit from it -- but you probably won't see a dime.
Many (some would say most) service organisations that use OSS to support their services also contribute in some way to the betterment of those products.
Fine. grsecurity is a better product because of those businesses. But it's author is still having to borrow money to put food on the table.
Glad to hear you are so knowledgeable about economics - try applying that knowledge.
The article was so biased as to be practically unreadable, but I think that this quote is relevent to our discussion:
While it may well be true that no one can make money from Open Source, that should only serve to discourage suppliers of software. On the demand side, however, consumers are saving tons of money by using Open Source.
That's what I've been saying all along. The author goes on to talk about how open source benefits just about everyone economically except for the developers.
Just because this particular OSS "business" is failing doesn't impunge on whole model. Many people do very well selling services based on OSS producats *and* contributing to the projects they use.
That's like saying that giving to charity is a great way to generate profits because Microsoft does very well selling software and donating to charities. The failure of this "business" doesn't discredit the whole open source development -- the reasons for the failure do.
Strangely, I don't see many posts decrying the "proprietory" business model every time a company fails (which a large number do).
What's so strange? The proprietary source business model is a proven success, with companies like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Symantec, Adobe, etc. all sucessfully employing it. The open source business model is new, largely unproven, and companies developing open source software profitably are few and far between.
I suggest you actually take an Economics 101 paper some day, the results may surprise you.
I already know more about economics than you ever will. That's why I don't develop software under the GPL, publish it on the Internet, and then expect money to come rolling in.
People are willing to pay money for Opera. I personally cannot understand why, but their money is talking -- for them, it is better.
People make all kinds of bad purchase decisions and the products that they choose are not always the best -- even for them.
How's Zeus grab you? Runs circles around Apache -- the apache developers themselves will be the first to tell you it's not a speed demon.
I've never used Zeus, but I'll take your word for it that it is faster than Apache. But there is more to "better" than simply "faster." If it was truly better for most corporations, why would so many run Apache? It's not like the $1700 (U.S.) is a big hurdle for a major corporation.
Show me serious OSS competition with Oracle 10g or DB2.
MySQL. I know a company right now that dropped their Oracle license and is switching to MySQL -- and they do databases as their primary business.
Back on topic, this guy's behavior doesn't impugn the OSS development model or even the business model. It's nothing more than a payment dispute -- they promised to pay him to work on something, they didn't, the guy stops working on it.
It does impugn it. It's not a payment dispute. He wrote "Due to a sponsor unexpectedly dropping sponsorship of grsecurity..." They are within their right and he has no legal recourse. No one was contractually obligated to pay him for his work, and that's the problem with open source.
I recommend that you look at the web page. Instead of asking for money (with which he could have bought food), he has created an Amazon.com: Wish List filled with CDs, DVDs, video games, and gaming video cards. If I were his family, I'd tell him to eat the DVDs and CDs that people sent him in response to his request for donations of same.
This is an ages old argument and stinks like so much COW DUNG.
It's an ages old argument that's based on good, solid reasoning. What is so damned confusing to you about the term "hobby"?
Just because someone enjoys what they do does not give big businesses a free pass to leave them in the cold when it comes time to have a home and eat.
He gave them the free pass when he put the code under GPL. He made the choice to let them take his work and give him nothing in return. Now that they have done just that, he's shocked, hurt, and upset.
Should a farmer provide his crops for free just because he enjoys working with the earth?
No, but if he puts his whole crop out by the side of the road with a big sign that says "free fruits and vegetables", then he shouldn't complain that he can't make a living as a farmer.
Shouldn't they be working for free?
I don't think anyone should be working for free. If you want to be paid to write software, then get a job as a software engineer or sell copyrighted software that you have written. Don't give away your work and then hope that some business wants to give you money out of charity. Act like a grown-up and enter into a legally-binding relationship if you want to be paid for your work.
The fact of the matter is that the business community is more than happy to charge the population for every piece of crap that they want to cram onto store shelves, but when someone who's not in the select ordained inner circle of business networks puts together a superior product then it's all "best wishes on your hobby! When you go bankrupt, lose your family, and commit suicide because you don't feel like living in the sewer we'll happily pick it up and make money off of it."
It has nothing to do with being "in the select ordained inner circle of business networks" and everything to do with how he chose to distribute his intellectual property. Did "the business community" force him to put his work under the GPL? Did they prevent him from getting a traditional copyright on the work? Did they prevent him from selling licenses to the product? No. Those choices were his and his alone.
If you were half as good at fishing as this guy was at writing security implementation maybe someone would pay you to do it.
If I was half as good at fishing as you are at being an ass, the oceans would be devoid of life. And if I wanted to be paid to fish, I would not show up at the dock every night giving away my catch to anyone who walked by. If you want to be paid to write software, then don't give it away and then expect for-profit businesses to donate money to you. This may come as a shock, but corporate officers have fiduciary responsibilities to their stockholders and can't just give away money to individuals to whom they have no legal obligations.
It remains that you use your mediocrity to justify taking a sick pleasure in watching someone else's efforts leave them penniless and at the end of their rope.
"Mediocrity"? How dare you!? You know nothing about me or my abilities.
I get no pleasure from knowing that he is in this situation and I resent your claim that I do. I'm sorry that he screwed up his life this way, but I'm not going to blame some business for his woes. I just hope someone reads what I wrote and that it helps them make better decisions than he did.
Perhaps you're not grasping that to many, it's simply not a model, it's a hobby, and that they do it simply because they love to.
My hobbies include motorcycling, fishing, boating, and RC airplanes (among many others). You don't see me threatening to take down web pages because companies aren't paying me to ride my motorcycle, to fish, boat, or fly model airplanes. If it's a hobby, then fine; treat it like one. Don't give away software for free and then complain that for-profit businesses aren't voluntarily sending you money.
Still, if you can't manage to pay people to do better than people will willingly do for free, you're seriously behind the productivity curve buddy. OSS hardly undercuts existing industry, it simply raises the bar. Your produced band for example had better have a more catchy sound than the bar band down the street, and if you want to sell a web server, it had better at least be as good as Apache.
Show me companies that are not "behind the productivity curve" when compared with Apache, Linux, *BSD, etc. Show me a better commercial browser than Mozilla. Show me a better web server than Apache. Show me better audio extraction software than Exact Audio Copy. Show me better Windows PC hardware monitoring software than Motherboard Monitor.
As you said earlier, to many, it's a hobby. The highest quality telescopes regularly come from the workshops of hobbyists. The best model train structures (houses, buildings, etc.) aren't the pre-assembled ones at hobby stores. They are the ones crafted by hobbyists. Hobbyists don't have deadlines, stockholders, etc. They can spend as much or as little time as they want.
I began the summer in debt and had to borrow money from family to pay for food. If none of the companies that depend on grsecurity, some of them being very large, are able to sponsor the project, grsecurity will cease to exist.
Another fine example of the open source business model.
Economics 101: Paying for something that your competitors get for free puts you at an economic disadvantage. Therefore, almost all companies will take open source software and not pay for it.
If General Motors gave away cars and asked for donations to cover R&D, production, etc., do you think that Hertz, Avis, Dollar, Enterprise, or any of the car rental firms would donate money to GM? Of course not. They would all take free cars for as long as GM was able and willing to give them away, though.
I will never understand why many professional software developers are proponents of open source. Buy a big-rig truck and start delivering goods for free. See how many Teamsters rally round you and cheer you on. You'll be lucky if you just get your knees broken.
What about airline fuel surcharges? Security fees? They are not quoted as part of the fare, appear along with other Tax, Fees, and Surcharges, and go directly to the airline.
At least a fuel surcharge represents an actual, quantifiable, understandable cost incurred by the airlines due to higher fuel prices. It's not given some kind of deceptive name to make it appear as if it were a government-imposed tax.
I'm not defending the practice, because I do believe it is deceptive. I'm only pointing out that it is not only the phone industry doing it, as the original poster claimed.
I agree that this deceptive practice takes place in other industries, but nowhere is is more rampant than in the telecom industry. I'd like to see a law passed that made all hidden fees illegal. If a company advertises a price of $39/month, that should be all that you pay unless the government requires that the provider collect taxes.
As someone who travels alot, let me tell you, taxes and what they apply to are not clear until you check out.
Taxes and fees are totally different things. The mobile phone industry regularly makes up fees which they deceptively name so that consumers believe that they are some kind of government-imposed tax. For example, T-Mobile has a "Regulatory Programs Fee" of $.86 per month. Nextel subscribers pay $1.55 a month for "Federal-Programs Cost Recovery." Other Nextel fees include a "Federal TRS Charge" and "State-Gross Receipts Recovery." Not one of those fees represents a federal, state, or local tax. No governmental agency required, or even approved, the collection of any of those fees.
If you are on business travel and you are charged a "tax" of 7.5% on your hotel room, it's because the state and/or local government requires it. If the hotel makes up a fictitious "tax", they can face criminal prosecution. If you want to know what the tax rates are, you can call state agencies and verify that you are being charged appropriately. That's a far cry from the mobile phone industry which simply makes up fees to fatten their wallets.
About 9 years ago, I was conducting a search for a mainframe systems/operations person.{snip}My test revealed the truth; she knew nothing.
Or your test revealed that she was one of the millions of people who are phobic about tests and do horribly on them as a result.
Without it, she would have easily bluffed her way through the process.
Then it sounds like you need to improve your skills as an interviewer. That's not meant as an insult. Interviewing applicants is something that most of us do relatively infrequently and it's an easy thing to make mistakes on
The person I hired was even MORE of a fraud than the previous example.
You can't treat every applicant as a suspected liar or fraud just because a handful of people fit that description. I've had a couple of bad experiences with employers. One misrepresented the pay as a "salary." The real case was that you got no overtime or comp time when you put in more than 40 hours, but if you put in 39, they wanted you to take an hour of vacation time. They also misrepresented the work as new development when it was mostly maintenance of legacy code. But I don't go into every interview with a chip on my shoulder as a result. I don't try to devise tests to see if the employer is lying. I don't demand that the HR person submit to a polygraph.
If you base the way you treat people on your worst experiences, you're going to do them, and yourself, a disservice.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like *your* software wasn't open-source. Maybe that was the problem all along and why the "Arts organization" dropped you in favor of your open source company.
Are you serious? Most organizations don't care at all about whether software is open-source. They are looking for software that meets their needs.
Given two packages that perform equally well, the organization is going to make their decision based on support. And "support" doesn't mean some college student in Finland who gets on IRC at night. It means an employee or local consultant who will answer the phone, maintain the systems, and meet with the customer when needed.
The delusions under which so many open-source proponents labor is incredible. It's like a shipping clerk who convinces himself that the rest of the company is really excited about his use of recycled packing peanuts.
If a developer writes a program, and open sources it, that developer has no right to be upset when a company or individual uses that program under the terms of the open source liscense used, and does not pay for it.
I never said that a developer had a moral right to be upset. I simply said that Apple's motivation is pure capitalism. They saw a source of free labor.
If a developer wants to make a living off a product's sales that he writes, giving it away for free is pretty stupid. Now if he wants to make a living off of support, customization or maintenance for a company off of that product, maybe giving it away for free isn't so bad.
Okay, this is a separate issue. It seems pretty damned stupid to give away the source if you want to make a living off of "support, cusomization maintenance." At that point, you've given away the crown jewels. It was the one thing that guaranteed you an advantage over your competitors and made you the one with whom companies would have to negotiate. Now anyone can compete with you if they are a competent software engineer. It could be someone closer to your customer. It could be a company in India willing to do the work for $5 per hour. I think that the proprietary software model has a lot longer and stronger history of success.
Apple has contributed back to open source software that they encorporate, in many situations...
So how do those "contributions" help the code's authors pay their mortgages, buy nicer cars, save towards their retirement, or put food on the table?
Apple uses OS as a tool, to improve their product, it is open source, it was INTENDED to be able to do that, but they arn't completely ungrateful about it.
Then let's see them start handing out checks to those who wrote substantial portions of code.
Isn't that a part of what makes open source great? The fact that you can take freely available code and build your own products and ideas on top? Are big businesses not allowed to do that too?
There's no question that big businesses think that it's great, but that's why some open source projects are going with dual licenses where commercial use has a different license than non-commercial use. Many open source contributers are annoyed when some large company like Apple takes open source and sells it for a huge profit. It's fun to share with peers, but it feels like being used when some firm like Apple resells your work while not paying you a dime.
Nobody contributing to open source has to show up at Apple's campus 5 days a week and sit in a cubicle for 8 hours, etc., etc.
Right. No salary. No Apple-supplied computer. No paid vacation. No phone, cubicle, photocopy machine, no office support. No medical insurance. No long-term disability insurance. No retirement plan. No stock options.
It's not free labor. Some of the contributions to open source projects come from companies and paid programmers using code and contributing their improvements or additions back. It's shared code. Nobody is necessarily doing it for free.
If you think that "nobody" is coding on open source projects for free, you're delusional. Most companies that use open source do not pay people to write code that is contributed back. But that's not the point. To Apple, all of that is free labor. They paid nothing for the code, hence the term free. Since the code is the product of thousands of hours of labor, the labor, to Apple, is free.
Only one problem: you can't tell them what to write. If they make something you can use, then that's great. Otherwise, it's no help.
In this case, they've already made something Apple could use -- and sell. So it was a no-brainer for Apple.
If you don't know what you're talking about.
At least I can form complete sentences.
Apple has been consistently feeding improvements back upstream to the two open source projects they've heavily borrowed from, FreeBSD and KHTML, in the form of no-strings-attached patches."
Whoop-dee-frigging-do!
"As a result both products have been at least to some degree improved. I don't exactly call that "no compensation".
If you went for a job interview and they promised to occasionally give you patches for your code, would you consider that to be compensation? Just how many meals can the talented open source engineers buy with free patches from Apple? How many months of mortgage will be paid with patches?
You may not call that "no compensation", but I do.
Furthermore, it's no accident that Apple has "embraced open source" because the open source movement's philosophy and criteria for license acceptance was crafted to cater to business.
Apple's use of open source is simple: They get man-years of development for which they pay nothing. They then resell a product incorporating all of the open source and don't compensate the authors in any way. This is like trying to figure out why people prefer free things. It's not rocket science. It's not philosophy. It's not Apple making a statement about the ideals of the open source community. They have found a source of free labor. It's that simple.
It's actually outsourcing taken to the next level. But instead of having programmers in India write their code for $3/hour, Apple gets the open source community to write it for $0 per hour/day/week/month/year.
I see what you're saying, but look at it this way: how much would you save later on?
How much would your competitors save later on? Capitalism is about gaining a monetary advantage over your competition. That's why software for business has traditionally been closed source and commercial.
Maybe you could even come to some sort of agreement with them to chip in equally for the project.
Now you are talking. But that's where the open source model falls apart. Everyone who does not contribute gets a monetary reward: They get the advantages of the product at their competitors' expense.
Letting the "something" go under puts you all at an economic disadvantage.
No, it keeps you all on an even footing. If given the choice of financing something that will equally benefit my firm and all of its competitors, I would not finance that thing. Suppose I paid $100,000 and my competitors paid nothing. My costs would be $100,000 greater than theirs, yet they would enjoy the same benefits, giving them an economic advantage. That $100K could have been used to hire an additial employee, to take out additional ads, etc.
You keep doing what you do best: programming/enhancing your product.
Get a friend from high school (a big mouth usually) as a partner who will be in charge of just promoting and selling your products and services.
Contract an accounting person to show up a couple days a month to do your books, and a lawyer to help you with patents in the future.
Hire some buddies, hire part-time accountants, and get a lawyer...": That sounds like the formula that lead to the failure of so many dot-coms and is a likely way to dig yourself a financial hole into which all of your savings will go.
The first thing that you need is a real business plan. It needs to be based on sound financial analysis which take into account the potential market, marketing costs, labor costs, competition, office space costs, etc. If you can't get a bank or venture capitalist to finance your company, then take advantage of their wisdom and ask for specifics as to where they saw unacceptable risks. Most of them have seen many businesses start and fail and will have a lot of insight. Don't quit your day job just because someone on the Internet told you that you would get rich selling support services for your open source project.
Before you start talking about partnerships, you need to consult an attorney and an accountant. You need to determine what kind of legal protections and tax protections are offered by various corporate arrangements. Do you want to organize as a Sub-Chapter S, Sub-Chapter C, LLC, sole proprietorship, etc? I don't know the answers, but you need to know them before diving into such a venture.
Finally, you need to try to remain objective. This software is your baby. You've invested countless hours in its creation. But you still need to step back and be realistic when evaluating its future and the competition. Looking at your product, it seems to be appeal to a rather limited audience: PalmOS users who wish to sync their handhelds with Java-enabled PCs AND who cannot use, or are dissatisfied with, the free app provided by Palm for that purpose. Sony has just announced that it is dropping out of the U.S. Palm market, leaving Palm as the only significant supplier of PalmOS handhelds. That should be a serious concern to you. What's your plan if Palm goes out of business or stops supplying handhelds to the mass market?
By making your work open source, you let your biggest competitive advantage, the fruits of your intellectual labor, slip through your fingers. Consultants who have offices closer to customers can compete with you to provide support, integration services, and development. Seven guys from India who share a one bedroom apartment and will work for $7/hour can compete with you. If your software is even reasonably well documented, competent software engineers all over the world will be able to add to it, modify it, and support it for their customers.
Your best bet is to come up with a new product, make it closed source, and get paid like the guys who sell WinZIP, WinRAR, UltraEdit, Vedit, FTP Voyager, FTP Serv-U, etc.
The alternative is to ask detailed probing questions at the interview and expect coherent answers in real time. I do not understand how this would be less stressful than a multiple choice test that was designed to be laughably easy for almost anyone.
Psychiatrists who specialize in phobias could explain it. A phobia is not a rational process.
I have hired enough people to have confidence in my ability to screen out the fakes; this was one of the few noteworthy exceptions.
It sounds like you have an acceptable failure rate then. Why risk offending many candidates when so few fakes get by you already? Do you really want your top prospect to be accept an offer from your competitor because he felt like your "test" was insulting and showed a lack of trust?
Maybe not, but you should be as selective in choosing the company as they are in choosing you. If you accept a job offer without sufficient "due dilligence", how is that any different from the employer drawing names out of hat and making an offer at random?
There's no question that there has to be "due diligence" on both sides, but what we are trying to establish is what constitutes due diligence. If the people in HR and the hiring managers say that the company offers wonderful growth opportunities, should I demand that they open up the personnel files to me so that I can check up on that claim? Of course not. I'm expected to take them at their word after a few polite questions. But you seem to advocate the company not extending the applicant the same courtesy.
It's not so much a matter of basing everything on a few bad experiences, it is more a matter of learning from mistakes. How many times do you need to repeat a bad experience before you think about ways of avoiding it next time?
It's a matter of balance. If you invest in mutual funds, one of them is probably going to drop in value some day. That doesn't mean that you pull all of your money out and put it into 1% interest savings accounts. If you hire 50 people and one of them turns out to be a "fake", you don't institute a policy that will annoy, anger, or demoralize 25 of the next 50.
Won't these costs just be forced down onto the customers? Sure, it funds Spamhaus, but why is this a good thing for a user who doesn't have to deal with spam? I get maybe one spam e-mail a day.
You're the same kind of a**hole who complains that some of his taxes are going to subsidize medical care for blind, quadrapalegic veterans. 'It doesn't help me personally, so why should I pay for it?' Talk about self-centered!
But, since you are that type of person, I have a suggestion: Your ISP should turn off all spam filtering and then force you to personally pay for all of the additional bandwidth, storage, and servers necessary to handle the load. Oh, and when other customers leave the service because they are now getting spam, your monthly bill will increase by the amount that they were paying to cover the ISP's losses.
You have an AOL address. That means that you are probably paying well over $20 per month for dial-up service. If you're so frigging concerned about the $.000034 per month that AOL might pass on to you (yes, that's the real number assuming $14,500/year divided amoung 35 million AOL subscribers), then why aren't you using any of the under-$10 ISPs out there?
Proven success, if your aim is to keep churning out products which are basically shit and full of bugs (talking about Microsoft)...{snip}Microsoft is so very afraid right now. Spreading FUD everywhere, including web forums like Slashdot.
In mentioning Microsoft (and Oracle, IBM, Symantec, etc.), I was speaking about the viability of the closed source business model, not about whether it produces superior software. I really think that you latched onto the entire Microsoft thing way too much. You hate Microsoft. We get it. But let's stick to the topic at hand.
I don't need antivirus stuff as I'm running Linux, so I'm not familiar with Symantec.
I find Symantec's antivirus software to be substandard, but running Linux is only a protection against viruses so long as Linux remains a relatively unpopular OS. If the idiots who run any attachment sent to them move to Linux, the virus writers will follow.
Seems to me that if you were running in races under the impression that you'd be given some sponsorship money, then didn't and had to starve to death for the summer, you'd probably sell your bike. Seems to me this is the same sort of thing...
:/
The difference is that I'd get a signed contract with the sponsor before I started racing. This guy was spending his life writing software based on the belief that some company was going to donate money to him.
Anyway, chalk it up to another gulliable guy who forgot that he had to put food on the table. Someday the majority of geeks'll have this figured out, hopefully.
I'm sorry for him, but if you go to the web page, you will find that his requested donations consists primarily of an Amazon.com "Wish List" of items like DVDs, video games, and CDs. If I were having to borrow money to buy food, I'd lose the Amazon.com Wish List and start pushing a PayPal account.
Traditionally, this situation (in game-theoretic terms, the public good problem) is solved by the imposition of government, which compells people to take the choice that, if individually made, would be disadvantageous, but if universally made, would be advantageous.
You are talking to a left-leaning, almost socialist some would say, person and even I'm a bit put off by this. Are you suggesting that government pay companies to use open source software (such as grsecurity) in lieu of commercial offerings? Talk about a double whammy! The authors still get no compensation and the government pays companies to not purchase commercial software. If you were talking about compensating authors, that would be a different matter, but paying companies to use free software?
With software development, on the other hand, if one niche is filled (suppose we got a really great world class word processor and all the people at Microsoft that work on Word and at Corel that work on WordPerfect lost their jobs), there's *always* another to fill.
I disagree. There aren't an infinite number of niches to fill. Even of those that do exist, only a small percentage of them could economically support commercial software developers. If there is an unending supply of profitable niches to fill, why are so many software engineers unemployed?
No, I am not.
But here goes, IBM gets most of its revenues from services. It is not alone. This is a model of doing business that works for millions of companies round the world. OSS supports that model.
If I raise vegetables and give them away, I'm sure that businesses would be happy to take the vegetables from me (by the truckload) and sell them. Thus, my labor and investment would support their business model. But that doesn't mean that "open source farming" is a viable way for me to earn a living. Sure, if you give something away, businesses will find a way to profit from it -- but you probably won't see a dime.
Many (some would say most) service organisations that use OSS to support their services also contribute in some way to the betterment of those products.
Fine. grsecurity is a better product because of those businesses. But it's author is still having to borrow money to put food on the table.
Glad to hear you are so knowledgeable about economics - try applying that knowledge.
The article was so biased as to be practically unreadable, but I think that this quote is relevent to our discussion:That's what I've been saying all along. The author goes on to talk about how open source benefits just about everyone economically except for the developers.
Just because this particular OSS "business" is failing doesn't impunge on whole model. Many people do very well selling services based on OSS producats *and* contributing to the projects they use.
That's like saying that giving to charity is a great way to generate profits because Microsoft does very well selling software and donating to charities. The failure of this "business" doesn't discredit the whole open source development -- the reasons for the failure do.
Strangely, I don't see many posts decrying the "proprietory" business model every time a company fails (which a large number do).
What's so strange? The proprietary source business model is a proven success, with companies like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Symantec, Adobe, etc. all sucessfully employing it. The open source business model is new, largely unproven, and companies developing open source software profitably are few and far between.
I suggest you actually take an Economics 101 paper some day, the results may surprise you.
I already know more about economics than you ever will. That's why I don't develop software under the GPL, publish it on the Internet, and then expect money to come rolling in.
People are willing to pay money for Opera. I personally cannot understand why, but their money is talking -- for them, it is better.
People make all kinds of bad purchase decisions and the products that they choose are not always the best -- even for them.
How's Zeus grab you? Runs circles around Apache -- the apache developers themselves will be the first to tell you it's not a speed demon.
I've never used Zeus, but I'll take your word for it that it is faster than Apache. But there is more to "better" than simply "faster." If it was truly better for most corporations, why would so many run Apache? It's not like the $1700 (U.S.) is a big hurdle for a major corporation.
Show me serious OSS competition with Oracle 10g or DB2.
MySQL. I know a company right now that dropped their Oracle license and is switching to MySQL -- and they do databases as their primary business.
Back on topic, this guy's behavior doesn't impugn the OSS development model or even the business model. It's nothing more than a payment dispute -- they promised to pay him to work on something, they didn't, the guy stops working on it.
It does impugn it. It's not a payment dispute. He wrote "Due to a sponsor unexpectedly dropping sponsorship of grsecurity..." They are within their right and he has no legal recourse. No one was contractually obligated to pay him for his work, and that's the problem with open source.
I recommend that you look at the web page. Instead of asking for money (with which he could have bought food), he has created an Amazon.com: Wish List filled with CDs, DVDs, video games, and gaming video cards. If I were his family, I'd tell him to eat the DVDs and CDs that people sent him in response to his request for donations of same.
This is an ages old argument and stinks like so much COW DUNG.
It's an ages old argument that's based on good, solid reasoning. What is so damned confusing to you about the term "hobby"?
Just because someone enjoys what they do does not give big businesses a free pass to leave them in the cold when it comes time to have a home and eat.
He gave them the free pass when he put the code under GPL. He made the choice to let them take his work and give him nothing in return. Now that they have done just that, he's shocked, hurt, and upset.
Should a farmer provide his crops for free just because he enjoys working with the earth?
No, but if he puts his whole crop out by the side of the road with a big sign that says "free fruits and vegetables", then he shouldn't complain that he can't make a living as a farmer.
Shouldn't they be working for free?
I don't think anyone should be working for free. If you want to be paid to write software, then get a job as a software engineer or sell copyrighted software that you have written. Don't give away your work and then hope that some business wants to give you money out of charity. Act like a grown-up and enter into a legally-binding relationship if you want to be paid for your work.
The fact of the matter is that the business community is more than happy to charge the population for every piece of crap that they want to cram onto store shelves, but when someone who's not in the select ordained inner circle of business networks puts together a superior product then it's all "best wishes on your hobby! When you go bankrupt, lose your family, and commit suicide because you don't feel like living in the sewer we'll happily pick it up and make money off of it."
It has nothing to do with being "in the select ordained inner circle of business networks" and everything to do with how he chose to distribute his intellectual property. Did "the business community" force him to put his work under the GPL? Did they prevent him from getting a traditional copyright on the work? Did they prevent him from selling licenses to the product? No. Those choices were his and his alone.
If you were half as good at fishing as this guy was at writing security implementation maybe someone would pay you to do it.
If I was half as good at fishing as you are at being an ass, the oceans would be devoid of life. And if I wanted to be paid to fish, I would not show up at the dock every night giving away my catch to anyone who walked by. If you want to be paid to write software, then don't give it away and then expect for-profit businesses to donate money to you. This may come as a shock, but corporate officers have fiduciary responsibilities to their stockholders and can't just give away money to individuals to whom they have no legal obligations.
It remains that you use your mediocrity to justify taking a sick pleasure in watching someone else's efforts leave them penniless and at the end of their rope.
"Mediocrity"? How dare you!? You know nothing about me or my abilities.
I get no pleasure from knowing that he is in this situation and I resent your claim that I do. I'm sorry that he screwed up his life this way, but I'm not going to blame some business for his woes. I just hope someone reads what I wrote and that it helps them make better decisions than he did.
Perhaps you're not grasping that to many, it's simply not a model, it's a hobby, and that they do it simply because they love to.
My hobbies include motorcycling, fishing, boating, and RC airplanes (among many others). You don't see me threatening to take down web pages because companies aren't paying me to ride my motorcycle, to fish, boat, or fly model airplanes. If it's a hobby, then fine; treat it like one. Don't give away software for free and then complain that for-profit businesses aren't voluntarily sending you money.
Still, if you can't manage to pay people to do better than people will willingly do for free, you're seriously behind the productivity curve buddy. OSS hardly undercuts existing industry, it simply raises the bar. Your produced band for example had better have a more catchy sound than the bar band down the street, and if you want to sell a web server, it had better at least be as good as Apache.
Show me companies that are not "behind the productivity curve" when compared with Apache, Linux, *BSD, etc. Show me a better commercial browser than Mozilla. Show me a better web server than Apache. Show me better audio extraction software than Exact Audio Copy. Show me better Windows PC hardware monitoring software than Motherboard Monitor.
As you said earlier, to many, it's a hobby. The highest quality telescopes regularly come from the workshops of hobbyists. The best model train structures (houses, buildings, etc.) aren't the pre-assembled ones at hobby stores. They are the ones crafted by hobbyists. Hobbyists don't have deadlines, stockholders, etc. They can spend as much or as little time as they want.
I began the summer in debt and had to borrow money from family to pay for food. If none of the companies that depend on grsecurity, some of them being very large, are able to sponsor the project, grsecurity will cease to exist.
Another fine example of the open source business model.
Economics 101: Paying for something that your competitors get for free puts you at an economic disadvantage. Therefore, almost all companies will take open source software and not pay for it.
If General Motors gave away cars and asked for donations to cover R&D, production, etc., do you think that Hertz, Avis, Dollar, Enterprise, or any of the car rental firms would donate money to GM? Of course not. They would all take free cars for as long as GM was able and willing to give them away, though.
I will never understand why many professional software developers are proponents of open source. Buy a big-rig truck and start delivering goods for free. See how many Teamsters rally round you and cheer you on. You'll be lucky if you just get your knees broken.
What about airline fuel surcharges? Security fees? They are not quoted as part of the fare, appear along with other Tax, Fees, and Surcharges, and go directly to the airline.
At least a fuel surcharge represents an actual, quantifiable, understandable cost incurred by the airlines due to higher fuel prices. It's not given some kind of deceptive name to make it appear as if it were a government-imposed tax.
I'm not defending the practice, because I do believe it is deceptive. I'm only pointing out that it is not only the phone industry doing it, as the original poster claimed.
I agree that this deceptive practice takes place in other industries, but nowhere is is more rampant than in the telecom industry. I'd like to see a law passed that made all hidden fees illegal. If a company advertises a price of $39/month, that should be all that you pay unless the government requires that the provider collect taxes.
As someone who travels alot, let me tell you, taxes and what they apply to are not clear until you check out.
Taxes and fees are totally different things. The mobile phone industry regularly makes up fees which they deceptively name so that consumers believe that they are some kind of government-imposed tax. For example, T-Mobile has a "Regulatory Programs Fee" of $.86 per month. Nextel subscribers pay $1.55 a month for "Federal-Programs Cost Recovery." Other Nextel fees include a "Federal TRS Charge" and "State-Gross Receipts Recovery." Not one of those fees represents a federal, state, or local tax. No governmental agency required, or even approved, the collection of any of those fees.
If you are on business travel and you are charged a "tax" of 7.5% on your hotel room, it's because the state and/or local government requires it. If the hotel makes up a fictitious "tax", they can face criminal prosecution. If you want to know what the tax rates are, you can call state agencies and verify that you are being charged appropriately. That's a far cry from the mobile phone industry which simply makes up fees to fatten their wallets.
About 9 years ago, I was conducting a search for a mainframe systems/operations person.{snip}My test revealed the truth; she knew nothing.
Or your test revealed that she was one of the millions of people who are phobic about tests and do horribly on them as a result.
Without it, she would have easily bluffed her way through the process.
Then it sounds like you need to improve your skills as an interviewer. That's not meant as an insult. Interviewing applicants is something that most of us do relatively infrequently and it's an easy thing to make mistakes on
The person I hired was even MORE of a fraud than the previous example.
You can't treat every applicant as a suspected liar or fraud just because a handful of people fit that description. I've had a couple of bad experiences with employers. One misrepresented the pay as a "salary." The real case was that you got no overtime or comp time when you put in more than 40 hours, but if you put in 39, they wanted you to take an hour of vacation time. They also misrepresented the work as new development when it was mostly maintenance of legacy code. But I don't go into every interview with a chip on my shoulder as a result. I don't try to devise tests to see if the employer is lying. I don't demand that the HR person submit to a polygraph.
If you base the way you treat people on your worst experiences, you're going to do them, and yourself, a disservice.