4 ms·

I guess that in some way a lot of companies are taking from open source without giving enough back. Open source is much cheaper than proprietary software to pro

by antirez 15y ago

I guess that in some way a lot of companies are taking from open source without giving enough back. Open source is much cheaper than proprietary software to produce, a team of a few guys do the work of what would be a much bigger team in a proprietary software, and there is no need to have a profit, paying the developers is enough, so... if companies using open source would give back even a small amount of money... But maybe some global "fund" should be used or something like that, I don't think that giving to the project you use is going to scale (we don't want a few guys rich, and nothing for all the rest, otherwise it's a company). But then bureaucracy starts to be an issue, who selects the right projects? And so forth. Not trivial. Or maybe the solution is that if you are an enough large company, hire N open source developers. Like charity there should be a non written rule that most tech corps should follow. Like the 1% rule: hire 1% of your work force to write open source (and probably this would end being a largere return about branding than many ADs large companies run for more money than that).

JoeAltmaier 15y ago
IF open source is The Way, it wouldn't need subsidizing. It sounds like all utopian arguments: If Only everybody came around to the right way of thinking, we'd all be better off. Sure its true, but it aint gonna happen.
- antirez 15y ago
  yep, but it's strange because it's hard to think at the whole IT economy of today without open source. The idea of startups itself was completely different. What Unix? buy a license, with proprietary hardware maybe, and then purchase the web server license, and the compiler... So soon or later it's gonna happen maybe as everything is posing on this base.
ajross 15y ago
I don't think resources are really the problem. There's a ton of money out there that pays for full-time open source developers. Basically all the core contributors of all the "serious" projects (i.e. things shipped in high-revenue-producing contexts) are already on staff somewhere. It's true that there's a much larger population of people (like me) who want to work full time on open source and would take a job if it was offered. But that just gets to what the linked article is talking about: companies don't generally "staff" free software projects with new hires. They hire the projects that already exist. So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)
- davidw 15y ago
  > There's a ton of money out there that pays for full-time open source developers. I don't know... I'm not sure it's really a ton. And a great deal of it comes from companies that derive their revenue from something else - in many cases, proprietary software. Ubuntu, for instance, is all about Mark's millions made from the sale of Thawte. > So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :) And then hope it's useful to someone who makes a bunch of money via proprietary software or something else that's scarce, and that they hire you. Why not just make something proprietary of your own to be more in control?
  - ajross 15y ago
    For some definition of "ton" anyway. Developers are cheap, comparatively. But the point remains: all the major kernel developers are paid for. All the big X.org people too; the Gnome people (though I'm told that investment is lacking on KDE); virtualization folks behind Xen and kvm; Android obviously comes right out of Google's payroll, likewise Chrome and Mozilla products. Really, if you were handed a big check and told to build a team of open source people, you'd have a hard time doing it without poaching from Red Hat, Google, Novell or Intel. And the final point was exactly what I was getting at. Getting yourself a free software gig requires pretty much exactly the same things as getting yourself a funded startup. In some sense it's a subset. Whether you want to make proprietary things or not is, I think, a personal decision.
    - davidw 15y ago
      Anecdote time: My last big open source effort, Hecl, weighs in at something like 100K lines of code. LiberWriter, my first real "pay for it if you want to use it" project, doesn't quite pay me enough to live on, yet, but earns decent money at around 10% of the lines of code. I did make some money consulting on Hecl, so it's not a total loss, and I had fun with it, and learned a lot. But in terms of the money, there's simply no competition: LiberWriter wins by a huge margin, even though it's simpler code that doesn't do as much. The big difference is with LW, people pay me directly. With Hecl, it was a matter of hoping someone would come along and pay to have some work done on it. It's just so much easier to deal with the former in terms of cash coming in.
jonstjohn 15y ago
My company, probably like many, uses a majority of open source software but rarely contributes back. As an aspiring open source developer (several projects in the works, not yet released), this has always felt wrong. Honestly, I haven't really raised it much with my company, though. Guilty as charged, although we've made some movement to release a few bits of code under an open license. Interesting thing is that we currently give 1% of our profits to an environmental program through Patagonia called 1% for the Planet. Maybe we need a 1% for Open Source where companies can be encouraged to contribute developer or $$ to open source projects. Anybody want to work on that?
- antirez 15y ago
  "Interesting thing is that we currently give 1% of our profits to an environmental program through Patagonia called 1% for the Planet." I think you are already doing it right, honestly. If you devolve 1% to whatever non-profit / good cause IMHO it's already enough. The real problem is that most companies will not do anything like that (1% is a lot), otherwise a few 1% to environment, a few 1% to open source, the world wold be a different place, entirely.

by antirez 15y ago

JoeAltmaier 15y ago

IF open source is The Way, it wouldn't need subsidizing. It sounds like all utopian arguments: If Only everybody came around to the right way of thinking, we'd all be better off. Sure its true, but it aint gonna happen.

antirez 15y ago
yep, but it's strange because it's hard to think at the whole IT economy of today without open source. The idea of startups itself was completely different. What Unix? buy a license, with proprietary hardware maybe, and then purchase the web server license, and the compiler... So soon or later it's gonna happen maybe as everything is posing on this base.

ajross 15y ago

I don't think resources are really the problem. There's a ton of money out there that pays for full-time open source developers. Basically all the core contributors of all the "serious" projects (i.e. things shipped in high-revenue-producing contexts) are already on staff somewhere. It's true that there's a much larger population of people (like me) who want to work full time on open source and would take a job if it was offered. But that just gets to what the linked article is talking about: companies don't generally "staff" free software projects with new hires. They hire the projects that already exist. So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)

davidw 15y ago
> There's a ton of money out there that pays for full-time open source developers. I don't know... I'm not sure it's really a ton. And a great deal of it comes from companies that derive their revenue from something else - in many cases, proprietary software. Ubuntu, for instance, is all about Mark's millions made from the sale of Thawte. > So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :) And then hope it's useful to someone who makes a bunch of money via proprietary software or something else that's scarce, and that they hire you. Why not just make something proprietary of your own to be more in control?
- ajross 15y ago
  For some definition of "ton" anyway. Developers are cheap, comparatively. But the point remains: all the major kernel developers are paid for. All the big X.org people too; the Gnome people (though I'm told that investment is lacking on KDE); virtualization folks behind Xen and kvm; Android obviously comes right out of Google's payroll, likewise Chrome and Mozilla products. Really, if you were handed a big check and told to build a team of open source people, you'd have a hard time doing it without poaching from Red Hat, Google, Novell or Intel. And the final point was exactly what I was getting at. Getting yourself a free software gig requires pretty much exactly the same things as getting yourself a funded startup. In some sense it's a subset. Whether you want to make proprietary things or not is, I think, a personal decision.
  - davidw 15y ago
    Anecdote time: My last big open source effort, Hecl, weighs in at something like 100K lines of code. LiberWriter, my first real "pay for it if you want to use it" project, doesn't quite pay me enough to live on, yet, but earns decent money at around 10% of the lines of code. I did make some money consulting on Hecl, so it's not a total loss, and I had fun with it, and learned a lot. But in terms of the money, there's simply no competition: LiberWriter wins by a huge margin, even though it's simpler code that doesn't do as much. The big difference is with LW, people pay me directly. With Hecl, it was a matter of hoping someone would come along and pay to have some work done on it. It's just so much easier to deal with the former in terms of cash coming in.

jonstjohn 15y ago

My company, probably like many, uses a majority of open source software but rarely contributes back. As an aspiring open source developer (several projects in the works, not yet released), this has always felt wrong. Honestly, I haven't really raised it much with my company, though. Guilty as charged, although we've made some movement to release a few bits of code under an open license. Interesting thing is that we currently give 1% of our profits to an environmental program through Patagonia called 1% for the Planet. Maybe we need a 1% for Open Source where companies can be encouraged to contribute developer or $$ to open source projects. Anybody want to work on that?

antirez 15y ago
"Interesting thing is that we currently give 1% of our profits to an environmental program through Patagonia called 1% for the Planet." I think you are already doing it right, honestly. If you devolve 1% to whatever non-profit / good cause IMHO it's already enough. The real problem is that most companies will not do anything like that (1% is a lot), otherwise a few 1% to environment, a few 1% to open source, the world wold be a different place, entirely.