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Sounds like a good opportunity to develop FOSS code rather than limit it to one company. I don't get it, though. The business wants the software - they pay to

by zanny 12y ago

Sounds like a good opportunity to develop FOSS code rather than limit it to one company. I don't get it, though. The business wants the software - they pay to have it made. And then they also want rights to it. I really like how you have to make copyright assignment explicit in the contract, because in general it is ridiculous to write code and then lock it behind a vault door and treat it like liquid gold when other people could benefit from it.

csense 12y ago
> it is ridiculous to write code and then lock it behind a vault door and treat it like liquid gold when other people could benefit from it This isn't "ridiculous". If other people could benefit from the code in question, it seems like at least some of them might be willing to pay for it. Why throw open your vault doors to the public for free when you can charge admission and there are people who want what's inside badly enough to pay?
- coderzach 12y ago
  Because the people who need contract development probably aren't the same people who would sell software libraries. Twitter, Facebook, et al, could probably make money off of all the stuff they open source. But they don't, because it's not their business.
HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
I don't often do this, but I feel I should take the opportunity to point out that I disagree completely with the sentiment in this post, but yet I was "forced" to upvote it because it had been unfairly downvoted. It's may be an unpopular opinion but it's not off topic nor offensive. Please don't downvote for popularity reasons.
mantrax5 12y ago
Other people. Like said company's competition? Like said company's clients? If I go to a restaurant and order a meal, and the waiter decides that's a good opportunity to invite his friends to eat from my plate, I'd find this a good opportunity to walk out without paying a dime.
- zanny 12y ago
  Because it is definitely appropriate to compare scarce resources atom based materials that compose most of the world, and new era digital information technology that uses electrical charge - the former is hard and expensive to synthesize and access is limited, the latter is effectively unlimited for our current needs, and the reproduction of patterns to convey information is also unlimited. It is more like you order something from the chef, and once he made it once he can hand out exact duplicates instantly to anyone else who walks through the door forever without any resource consumption. In that situation, it is ridiculous to try to charge everyone that walks through the door the costs of the scarce resources when there are no resource constraints at all anymore. In software, the resource constraint is developer time and effort. The resultant information from the labor is not scarce, and others will gladly redistribute it for you (see: torrents, public repositories, usenet) so there are no costs (in time, or resources) to provide it. So you could either be an asshole and let people starve on the street while you eat your fancy dish while the chef has an infinite number of copies of it sitting on the drysink, or you could let people come through, grab some grub, and enjoy it like you did, even though you paid for the initial copy to be made, it takes nothing away from you to let others benefit from your investment. If anything, people will be gracious to you for investing to make the infinite food dish happen, and you should expect good karma to come back in turn.
  - mantrax5 12y ago
    Yeah. Copying software is free, dude. 1. Fuck supporting your software though, your time is not free. If people keep calling and asking questions, fuck 'em. 2. Fuck dealing with the resulting fragmentation from people forking it left and right. This would incur a very serious damage to your client as well, but fuck him too. 3. Fuck maintaining your software. Because the configurations and platforms people will be deploying your software to are nothing like the the ones your client is paying you for, so the bugs your client sees and your open source users see are nothing alike. The point I'm driving, is that it's easy to talk about how copying code is easy. But your code is worthless without considering everything else I said above. And all I said above requires your involvement, your effort and your time. I mean people are easy to copy too. Practically free. But for some reason, sleeping around and abandoning your children afterwards is not considered a noble act.
pgeorgi 12y ago
I guess most businesses couldn't care less about control over _all_ instances of the software they need to operate, but they want control over (and thus access to) every aspect of _their_ instance. copyright assignments are the standard way to achieve this (and then some, which they might not actually care about - but since it doesn't hurt...)
rmc 12y ago
Not all things contractors do are nice FOSS-able libraries. What about a slideshow & presentation about how the company can get more clients, which is chock full of internal data? What about the configuration settings for the company's app to allow some new feature?

by zanny 12y ago

csense 12y ago

> it is ridiculous to write code and then lock it behind a vault door and treat it like liquid gold when other people could benefit from it This isn't "ridiculous". If other people could benefit from the code in question, it seems like at least some of them might be willing to pay for it. Why throw open your vault doors to the public for free when you can charge admission and there are people who want what's inside badly enough to pay?

coderzach 12y ago
Because the people who need contract development probably aren't the same people who would sell software libraries. Twitter, Facebook, et al, could probably make money off of all the stuff they open source. But they don't, because it's not their business.

HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago

I don't often do this, but I feel I should take the opportunity to point out that I disagree completely with the sentiment in this post, but yet I was "forced" to upvote it because it had been unfairly downvoted. It's may be an unpopular opinion but it's not off topic nor offensive. Please don't downvote for popularity reasons.

mantrax5 12y ago

Other people. Like said company's competition? Like said company's clients? If I go to a restaurant and order a meal, and the waiter decides that's a good opportunity to invite his friends to eat from my plate, I'd find this a good opportunity to walk out without paying a dime.

zanny 12y ago
Because it is definitely appropriate to compare scarce resources atom based materials that compose most of the world, and new era digital information technology that uses electrical charge - the former is hard and expensive to synthesize and access is limited, the latter is effectively unlimited for our current needs, and the reproduction of patterns to convey information is also unlimited. It is more like you order something from the chef, and once he made it once he can hand out exact duplicates instantly to anyone else who walks through the door forever without any resource consumption. In that situation, it is ridiculous to try to charge everyone that walks through the door the costs of the scarce resources when there are no resource constraints at all anymore. In software, the resource constraint is developer time and effort. The resultant information from the labor is not scarce, and others will gladly redistribute it for you (see: torrents, public repositories, usenet) so there are no costs (in time, or resources) to provide it. So you could either be an asshole and let people starve on the street while you eat your fancy dish while the chef has an infinite number of copies of it sitting on the drysink, or you could let people come through, grab some grub, and enjoy it like you did, even though you paid for the initial copy to be made, it takes nothing away from you to let others benefit from your investment. If anything, people will be gracious to you for investing to make the infinite food dish happen, and you should expect good karma to come back in turn.
- mantrax5 12y ago
  Yeah. Copying software is free, dude. 1. Fuck supporting your software though, your time is not free. If people keep calling and asking questions, fuck 'em. 2. Fuck dealing with the resulting fragmentation from people forking it left and right. This would incur a very serious damage to your client as well, but fuck him too. 3. Fuck maintaining your software. Because the configurations and platforms people will be deploying your software to are nothing like the the ones your client is paying you for, so the bugs your client sees and your open source users see are nothing alike. The point I'm driving, is that it's easy to talk about how copying code is easy. But your code is worthless without considering everything else I said above. And all I said above requires your involvement, your effort and your time. I mean people are easy to copy too. Practically free. But for some reason, sleeping around and abandoning your children afterwards is not considered a noble act.

pgeorgi 12y ago

I guess most businesses couldn't care less about control over _all_ instances of the software they need to operate, but they want control over (and thus access to) every aspect of _their_ instance. copyright assignments are the standard way to achieve this (and then some, which they might not actually care about - but since it doesn't hurt...)

rmc 12y ago

Not all things contractors do are nice FOSS-able libraries. What about a slideshow & presentation about how the company can get more clients, which is chock full of internal data? What about the configuration settings for the company's app to allow some new feature?