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I do want to argue the point. :) The strange miracle of open source software is that when companies use something like Redis to make a lot of money, they end u

I do want to argue the point. :) The strange miracle of open source software is that when companies use something like Redis to make a lot of money, they end up investing in it, they contribute work to the project, and the community does gain from their contributions. In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time. Most open source development is commercial. To take an example from my day job: Bloomberg (the financial media giant) sponsored Andy Wingo (of Igalia, that guy is a genius) to contribute support for ES6 generators to both Mozilla's JS engine and Chrome's. An example of his amazing work: http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-firefox-now-twenty-two-times-faster http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-firefo... Companies use all things to get richer. That's the operating principle of companies. The competing model to open source is commercial software, in which the company owning the software has a monopoly over it and uses it to get richer... and the companies licensing it still use it to get richer. In corporate welfare, the money given to companies is taken from someone else's pocket. Open source software is cheap because it eliminates the artificial costs of copyright monopolies.

seiji 12y ago
In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time. It's a matter of project scale too. Nobody cares about exploiting Hadoop because it's millions of lines of low quality code written by thousands of day-job developers. But, if a project is clearly the work of, say, 2-5 individual developers, it's easier to see how those individuals are creating much more value than anybody is possibly compensating them for. The main complaint seems to be "offering things for free then expecting good things to happen" doesn't work. So the only solution is "offer things for free and also provide support/services/hosting/accoutrement to companies with big pockets." The trick is: how do you incentive companies to pay in the first place? There's the mongodb model: market, popularize, and aggressively sell broken software so people must buy support or else nothing works at all, or there's the RedHat model: target big companies and become their source of trust/knowledge for complicated things the buying company doesn't want to manage/understand themselves. It can be difficult to sell highly popular, non-broken, simple software. It works, people use it, there are no problems, so, why pay, even when it runs your multi-billion dollar company (especially when the free support resolves all issues in less than 20 minutes anyway)?
- jorendorffmoz 12y ago
  But, if a project is clearly the work of, say, 2-5 individual developers, it's easier to see how those individuals are creating much more value than anybody is possibly compensating them for. I think this is true of anything worth doing. I like your characterization of the mongodb model and the RedHat model. (I don't see anything wrong with RedHat's model, by the way. More power to them.) But your complaint would have made a lot more sense fifteen years ago. Now there are a lot of other models. There are even other models that work really nicely! There are consultancies, like Igalia. Some companies hire open source developers because they use the project and want to make sure active development continues (antirez's day job might be an example of this; at a guess that's why Google once hired GvR, the creator of Python). Some use OSS projects as a recruiting tool; smart ones use it as a signal of quality in hiring. If you selectively hire engineers with OSS on their resumes, you are unwittingly paying returns to OSS development. Companies can also use OSS to reduce the cost of external efforts that are strategically important to them, and they can win a developer mindshare benefit from doing so. This is why Microsoft open-sourced the .NET platform (under a good license!). I'm no VC but the bazaar seems healthier financially than it's ever been.
  - seiji 12y ago
    the bazaar seems healthier financially than it's ever been. Well, it's the difference between getting paid (salary, fixed, no logical incentive to grow/improve) versus getting paid (percentages of benefit, the more benefit you create the more you make, growing non-linearly with your actual output). All of this is really just complaining around the fact it's not easy to reap rewards proportional to the benefit of software without creating a company and all the overhead required therein. Another great example: memcached. It's well known facebook uses memcached heavily. The creator of memcached doesn't see any benefit from their usage of his software. Modern high-growth, multi-billion dollar companies are built on top of the work of individuals they don't even attempt to compensate. Some of these arguments also apply to modern exploitation of musicians a la spotify/steal-my-music-ify, etc.
    - jorendorffmoz 12y ago

seiji 12y ago

In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time. It's a matter of project scale too. Nobody cares about exploiting Hadoop because it's millions of lines of low quality code written by thousands of day-job developers. But, if a project is clearly the work of, say, 2-5 individual developers, it's easier to see how those individuals are creating much more value than anybody is possibly compensating them for. The main complaint seems to be "offering things for free then expecting good things to happen" doesn't work. So the only solution is "offer things for free and also provide support/services/hosting/accoutrement to companies with big pockets." The trick is: how do you incentive companies to pay in the first place? There's the mongodb model: market, popularize, and aggressively sell broken software so people must buy support or else nothing works at all, or there's the RedHat model: target big companies and become their source of trust/knowledge for complicated things the buying company doesn't want to manage/understand themselves. It can be difficult to sell highly popular, non-broken, simple software. It works, people use it, there are no problems, so, why pay, even when it runs your multi-billion dollar company (especially when the free support resolves all issues in less than 20 minutes anyway)?

jorendorffmoz 12y ago
But, if a project is clearly the work of, say, 2-5 individual developers, it's easier to see how those individuals are creating much more value than anybody is possibly compensating them for. I think this is true of anything worth doing. I like your characterization of the mongodb model and the RedHat model. (I don't see anything wrong with RedHat's model, by the way. More power to them.) But your complaint would have made a lot more sense fifteen years ago. Now there are a lot of other models. There are even other models that work really nicely! There are consultancies, like Igalia. Some companies hire open source developers because they use the project and want to make sure active development continues (antirez's day job might be an example of this; at a guess that's why Google once hired GvR, the creator of Python). Some use OSS projects as a recruiting tool; smart ones use it as a signal of quality in hiring. If you selectively hire engineers with OSS on their resumes, you are unwittingly paying returns to OSS development. Companies can also use OSS to reduce the cost of external efforts that are strategically important to them, and they can win a developer mindshare benefit from doing so. This is why Microsoft open-sourced the .NET platform (under a good license!). I'm no VC but the bazaar seems healthier financially than it's ever been.
- seiji 12y ago
  the bazaar seems healthier financially than it's ever been. Well, it's the difference between getting paid (salary, fixed, no logical incentive to grow/improve) versus getting paid (percentages of benefit, the more benefit you create the more you make, growing non-linearly with your actual output). All of this is really just complaining around the fact it's not easy to reap rewards proportional to the benefit of software without creating a company and all the overhead required therein. Another great example: memcached. It's well known facebook uses memcached heavily. The creator of memcached doesn't see any benefit from their usage of his software. Modern high-growth, multi-billion dollar companies are built on top of the work of individuals they don't even attempt to compensate. Some of these arguments also apply to modern exploitation of musicians a la spotify/steal-my-music-ify, etc.
  - jorendorffmoz 12y ago