Open Source - Why Do We Do It? 378
mikosullivan presents us with a unique opportuinity: "This Saturday, Sep 8, I have an appointment to meet with Congressman Rick Boucher to discuss open-source software. I made the appointment after talking to the congressman at a town-meeting here in Blacksburg, VA. During our short talk he asked a question that (not being a particularly talented public speaker) I found difficult to answer: why do open source software developers devote their time and talents to something they give away? That's the question I'd particularly like to answer: why do we do it? Answering this question may be the key to resolving public FUD about open source. This meeting is part of the
opensourcelobby.org efforts."
It's deeper than because we can. (Score:3, Interesting)
If others improve on your work, you still made it possible for the improvement to happen. If you improved someone elses work, you still feel ownership of making it better. In short, it makes us feel good.
-- Len
Demonstration... (Score:3, Interesting)
Sir Edmund Hillary (Score:4, Interesting)
Which is obviously no different from the views of commercial developers. The turning point isn't why such energy is put into it, it's why you give it away. And that should be self evident: in an increasingly, hideously commercialized society, developers are forced every day to work with things that don't work right, cost exorbitant amounts of money, and make you forego many of what should otherwise be your usage rights at the behest of whoever's selling said thing. Why give it away? To counterbalance the lunacy of current sales policy. Why put so much effort in? No-one likes working with junk.
Why I do it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Alternatives to money? (Score:3, Interesting)
All these things are fantastic for open source software, and in the main they keep the projects going. BUT.. they'll only keep the project going while the creative people have enthuiasm for the thing they're doing. If that motivation ever disappears then the project disappears with it.
This, in my opinion, is why the GPL is ultimately bad for free and open source software. The GPL forces software derived from other open projects to remain open. While this doesn't stop people making a decent living supporting and maintaining their work, it does stop the 'traditional' business model of selling your software. This elminates the source of motivation that keeps many projects going long after the original excitement has run out. In the long term, I feel this will stop many talented developers taking projects to their maximum. Truely free software is not restricted in any way. If people want to close the source and sell their work they ought to be allowed to.
Let the flaming begin..
Why do I do it? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why I feel obliqued to return something to the community that provides the software I use. Others do webdesign, translations of documentation, organization of shows, writting new software, whatever. I'm rather good (I think) at writting software, so that's what I do.
Regards,
Tobias
Salman Rushdie explains... (Score:4, Interesting)
In the end, you write the book that grabs
you by the throat and demands to be written.
That's more or less how I feel about writing open source software.
I don't like to wear shackles (Score:2, Interesting)
The reason I would want to write open source software is rooted in the basis for my wanting to use it.
When I purchase a software license for my company I get a shrink-wrapped box with some CDs inside. I install the software (after perhaps contacting the software vendor and getting a license key to unlock it). I attempt to read the documentation to learn how it works, often times the available documentation isn't very good and I need to go to a class to use it. While implementing the software package I have to figure out how I should change the way I do things so that my practices comply with the methods available from the software package. Many things I would like to get done are not possible with that software package because it doesn't provide those features. I'm locked into whatever they give me to work with and I have very few options for customizations because of this.
Now this software package comes with support that I can renew every year. If I keep renewing my support I can get upgrades as they are released. If I chose not to upgrade to the newer version eventually soon I will no longer be supported. I have to upgrade the package on the vendors schedule not my own, because they are the ones that determine when support runs out on the version I may be using. Since there software has a minimum system requirement I also have to continue to upgrade the operating system that I am running and therefore the hardware that my systems are running because the new operating system is progressive and doesn't support the older hardware.
This upgrade cycle is necessary to maintain support from the software vendor. Software contains bugs. This is true of all software (except perhaps certain "Hello world" applications). Since the vendor is the only company that has the source code they are the only ones that can support the software. They control something that I come to rely on for my business.
Now open software generally (by my experience) has better forums to discuss software problems and how it's used. You also have the option of going into the source code and making customizations that you need. All of the other people running the software also have this option. Chances are if you didn't have time or the expertise to make those changes or customizations to the software someone else might have. This is because many people have similar needs. Now if those people who made the customizations also contributed their changes back to everyone else you can use those contributions.
Also if you need your open source software to support your older system (which may be doing its job just fine and would otherwise be a waste of money and resources to upgrade) you have that option. Chances are if you have this need other people do as well and you all help each other out.
These are the reasons I use open source software.
When I write software and I release it open sourced my software becomes more useful by other people (who are also using it) who contribute to it and add back to my product. I get to enjoy their improvements as well. It's a two-way road.
Because it is what I feel is right. (Score:3, Interesting)
I got my first computer only a couple of years ago. In the first week
I had it, I spent about 48 hours (20 consecutive) on the GNU website,
reading and re-reading everything they had, and finding out more about
the Free Software movement. The ideals of the Free Software
Foundation correspond very closely to my ideals for the world at
large. Although I last wrote a computer program in fifth-grade LOGO
class, I decided that I wanted to do my part, and slowly made the
transition from MacOS to GNU/Linux (first LinuxPPC, then Debian).
I think the freedoms that GNU describes -- to use, study, redistribute
and modify -- are essential, and because of the hard work of many
hackers, they are now within reach. I knew I wanted to write only
Free Software before I even knew how to code. I now have a job that
lets me write Free Software, and I will never take a job that requires
me to write non-free software. Maybe it was easy for me to make these
decisions because I made them before I learned to code.
Well, during the transition period between MacOS and GNU/Linux, I used
BBEdit, a good-but-proprietary editor, on the MacOS. When you edit
HTML with it there's a little check-box to "Give BBEdit Credit" --
embedding a little meta-creator tag saying that you'd written the HTML
in BBEdit. I always had to uncheck that box, because I was not using
BBEdit in a manner compliant with the terms of its license -- I had
not paid for it. Later, using the GIMP, when I saved an image in a
format that allowed embedded comments, I saw an option to say "Made
with the GIMP". I reflexively moved to uncheck the box -- after all,
I had not paid for the software. Then I realized that I was still
using it in compliance with its license, and I proudly, and giddily,
left the box checked: Made with the GIMP.
I now use, write and recommend only Free Software. I do it because
I'm a pretty hard-line GNU devotee, so that's obviously why I don't
call it "Open Source". I worry that there might not be enough people
who cherish the freedoms of Free Software, too many who think that
it's just cool and convenient. What the FSF, GNU, and other Free
Software projects have achieved is amazing and incredible. I write
Free Software because I believe it must exist, and I want my actions
to be in line with my beliefs.
because I don't want a company to own everything (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd rather not get noticed or be famous. I enjoy writing useful code and learning new and better ways of doing some task or process.
...or maybe not (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, and by the way the prices of PCs are so low that compared to a few years ago you could buy $2k of software before you got anywhere near the purchase price of the hardware.
What you're saying is you're not willing to pay the programmers that do all this nice work for your lame ass to use.
There are lots of great reasons to use Linux, but I'm afraid the "free beer" part is (usually) much less important than the "free speech" part. When MS ups the ante to the point where it really hurts people THEN we'll see a more serious migration (especially in corporate settings) to Linux.
Business realities (Score:2, Interesting)
1). Microsoft has such a strong position in the market that people have an irrational fear of using anything else. If I wrote a word processor that was demonstrably better than MS Word I'd have trouble GIVING it away, let alone selling it.
2). Software is easy to copy. Even if I write really good software and sell it cheap, not everyone will buy a legal copy.
3). Software can easily be written by one person working on his kitchen table. Selling software requires a LOT more resources, including employees who will insist on being paid whether the company makes any money or not.
4). If I sell software I am morally obligated to stand behind it to some extent, to provide support. Giving away software with source means that anyone who gets my software can solve his own problems. I can refuse to be liable for what my software does with a clean conscience.
5). If I give my software away with source code I don't get any money for the software. However, I don't lose money either. (http://sourceforge.net provides a method of distributing my software to anyone that wants it without cost to me.) Maybe I can gain a reputation for writing good code or designing good systems that may help me find work. There is plenty of work writing custom software and that is a surer way of making money than running a software business.
6). Since everyone who uses my program gets my source code, some of them may be motivated to find and fix bugs, add features to my project, etc., all at no cost to me. This has in fact already happened on my own project.
7). I don't have to give anyone guilt trips about paying for my work and not sharing it with their friends. I WANT them to share with their friends! The more the better!
8). Finally, I can benefit by the code and programs of others. If someone else's program has a feature that would also be useful in my own, I can use his code as is or try to improve on it.
Contrast this with Microsoft's business model, which is to convince people to buy basically the same products over and over again every few years, when the products they bought the last time still work and will NEVER wear out? When the new products require a new computer to run? It is amazing they are still in business!
Why write Free Software? (Score:2, Interesting)
1) I wanted to repay Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds and
all the other Free Software writers for giving me a cheap/free
Unix with all the tools and ESPECIALLY THE COMPILER.
2) I write numerical software(Finite Element Analysis) and
am dependent on the fact that numerical techniques such as
Gauss Quadrature, LU decomposition, the Method of Conjugate Gradients,
Lanczos Method of tridiagonalizing a matrix, and the QR algorithm,
are all open and free for me to use. Scientific computing would
be dead if these techniques were closed off due to patents or
hidden in the proprietary code of some company.
3) Companies ask programmers and engineers to sign non-disclosure
agreements(NDA). With Free Software I can:
a) Create a body of work before becoming employed which
I can take anywhere that will override the unfair parts of a
broadly drawn NDA. Releasing it as Free Software makes
it public.
b) Other programmers can do the same. If they add to the work
can say they are legally bound( at least by the GPL) to
contribute back to the code and therefore, will be able to
have these contributions go with them to their next job.
4) Keeping things secret and closed is self-defeating, especially in
science. I say this from personal experience of working in
academia. Anyone who does science knows that even under the best
circumstances where one has access to every equation, journal,
expert in the field, etc. it is still a very difficult process. Let's
not make it worse by hiding source.
And on and on
It makes business sense (Score:1, Interesting)
Say, I want to use a J2EE application server. I start with the open source versions get familiar with the technology, etc. If my needs outgrow the free software, I can buy the commercial one. All the knowledge I gathered is kept.
If I find bugs, I send them back. Not because I'm altruist. It's because I'm lazy and I don't want to redo that fix each time I install a new version of the software (open source usually has frequent releases). By giving back fixes, I make sure the fixes stay.
If the software we write isn't core to my company. Releasing it to open source gives us visibility, and potentially more volunteers to help work on problems that are important for the business. We might even find a very talented programmer and hire him.
Another big case for Open Source is the feeling that something is wrong when you have to buy something as trivial as a word processor or other similar software. They have been around for 15 years without much in terms of real improvements. Why would a business pay 200$ per seat for that ? (yeah discount available if you 10000 people working for you... we don't). The worst is that we have to buy the latest version of those software becuase otherwise we can't read what clients are sending us...
I hope this helps.
It's hard to make $ from software (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:because not everyone is money-motivated (Score:3, Interesting)
Huh? Nobody's asking them to GPL their crap. Piracy wouldn't get more widespread- it would still only take one disgruntled employee to call in the MS auditors. If it were Open Source, it would fucking work! Security patches would be out at least as fast as patches for Linux. Outlook wouldn't spread viruses. That would all be fixed, and they would get these improvements for free.
I'm sorry, but going Open would be the smartest thing that MS could do. They wouldn't lose any more money than they already are, and we would lose our biggest arguments against them. They could license it so that outside coders would lose rights to their patches to MS, and soon they would be selling an OS and an office suite that were actually worth the money.
It's akin to the weekend warrior (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm sure most open-sourcer's do "it" for similar reasons.
Now that I think about it the professional sports leagues don't feel real threatened by the weekend warrior even though they probably spend more money playing softball (with all the beer and all) than they spend at baseball games. I wonder why the big software corps are so afraid of us?
- Colnago
Why I Write Code for Free (Score:4, Interesting)
I do it because the equivalent commercial products suck. They are overpriced ( to the tunes of thousands of dollars ) and not as feature rich. Working for an ISP providing dialup services, having a functional Radius server that is scalable, reliable, and most of all, easily modified is paramount to the success of our business.
So, I get paid by my employer to write code that ends up under the GPL in the server. The entire world gets a killer server for a great price. And my employer gets the benefit of a larger array of "virtual programmers" who are constantly reviewing and improving the code. It's a shared development cost more than anything else.
Plus, I like writing code, and I've gotten to interact with people from all over the world as they use the server.
My 2 cents anyway. Others have probably said it better than I, but this is why *I* write code and give it away. :)
Asking us "why" is the reason I do it; to ask why. (Score:2, Interesting)
I would also like to have a disclaimer that I work for a company that has commercial, closed source, software and I am the main developer for that program. Although my preference is Open Source, my employer has final say in how the software I write on their time is used. I like working for the company, so we have an agreement about releasing some code openly and some closed.
My first exposure to "Open Source" software (c: it was not called that at the time) was in the Marine Corps, I was stationed on El Toro in Santa Ana, CA and tasked with being the "firewall administrator." The first thing I did was look for the fire exists and extinguisher.
Because I was given this responsibility, and the Military would not train me on maintaining the system (c: nobody else there knew it and we did not have the money for classes), I was forced to start poking around on the system. The system was using BSDI and Gauntlet as the firewall software.
When I didn't know how something worked, or when I had the question "why" I could always start looking. I took a long time before I ever managed to fix my own mistakes, but I learned how to troubleshoot and tackle problems procedurally. This helped tremendously when I was in the field, when other people would get overwhelmed by inspections, formations, the route for the march, etc. I just broke it down and started to pick it apart like the firewall.
Had the Military sent me to any formal training I don't think I would have had that, because I would have stopped learning when I knew how to perform the basic functions. Or I would have waited for someone to send me to a class where I would be told most of what I needed to do and provided with the information. There would also be no opportunity to become enthralled in why this box did what it did, which would not have translated into learning how to handle situations where I am not given every piece of information or a long time to prepare.
When I was transferred from MCAS El Toro to MCAS Miramar in 1998 my SNCOIC was sent to the secondary 40xx MOS school. In that class they used a Portuguese version of Linux to setup DNS servers. There were two main reasons that they used Linux, the cost and the availability.
Keep in mind that not every department in the Military has a ton of money, some of the 3MAW units were still using 486 computers on the desktop when I was on MCAS Miramar in 1999. They were able to do this because the servers were running Banyan VINES, which hosts the email and file storage at the server rather than the local computer. When we were forced, even after I put up a BIG fight, to migrate to Windows NT as part of the BRAC this changed; virtually all of the networking and desktop systems, which had not been recently purchased, had to be torn out.
The cost justification for using Linux to teach was that it wouldn't have to be authorized for the budget and could be setup quickly because it was freely available.
I don't know if you are familiar with the way the budget works, but if you don't spend the money you are allocated for the year you loose it; and your budget for the next year is probably going to be lower. There's no incentive to NOT spend money like it would never end.
But not everybody had that money, so using Linux provided the lowest common denominator that everyone could use.
After having been on MCAS Miramar I was one of the only people with Unix backgrounds, everyone else learned NT because of the BRAC migration. When talking to one of the other "old timers" on another base, I became aware of the number of programmers the DoD has. Yet the DoD does not write much of its own software for general use, they use COTS software instead.
The money the DoD spends on buying software could easily finance the programmers writing that functionality into any needed software. This software could easily be used in other Government departments and would not require the purchase of an entirely new application to get any needed functionality or features.
I realize my thought process is has run away, so to cut this short and summarize my reason for writing code and giving it away is because I like to ask "why".
If you are interested, some specific examples of why include:
1. I am a Marine and I come from a _very_ military family; of my 9 siblings 6 have already served in addition to my Father and Uncles. I never want to hear about a Marine, Sailor or Soldier killed in combat because their Pocket PC crashed. Nothing will ever be completely fail safe, but Open Source allows for a bigger review process with a better chance of finding problems.
Consider encryption, why doesn't the Government keep their encryption schemes a secret if they are supposed to be used to secure the most sensitive data they have? Why not throw all the Russians in jail under the DMCA if they try to break the encryption? We could have ended the Cold War a lot quicker that way.
2. The DoD has a lot of programmers, what would it look like from a cost savings perspective if those programmers contributed to Open Source? How much money would the DoD save in making Linux Common Criteria Certified and deployed internally. Use SE Linux, created by the
NSA, on the servers and critical desktops, SAMBA for file and print sharing, etc. The put the money towards beans, band-aids and bullets.
This is one of my motivations, because I have "been there, done that" in the field with old, outdated, hand-me-down equipment falling appart. The justification was always that we did not have the money, but if you went into our comptuer room we have rows of Compaq Proliant 6500 computers fully loaded running Windows NT. With Linux we would not need machines that big, or that expensive. We would also save money on the licensing and not have to upgrade so often.
3. If I write software I usually learn something in the process, often not just about the program but about myself as well. But if I have other people contributing to my code I can learn from them as well, if the code is closed they are less likely to contribute their knowledge and experience. This allowed me to learn things much faster and tap a much broader knowledge base when I get into a Portuguese bind (c: BIND = = DNS).
4. So I can ask why. Why does this work? Why _doesn't_ this work? Why can't I do what I want to do?
By asking "why" I poke and prod until I either have more questions or until I get sued and put in jail.
Unlike many people I do not tend to stop when I am faced with what at first appears to be an unanswerable question; I pick it appart or ask for the assistance of others to find the answer; which leads to more questions.
Because it is not the answer that is important, it is where you are left after having had the inquiry.
What good is it to talk to myself?
That is what it is like to program with closed source software, nobody but your co-workers can see what you have created. Nobody can witness that clever algorithm you created to solve a really thorny problem; all they see is the result of the program in action.
As an example, earlier today I had a co-worker who took a 15 line script for error checking and re-wrote it in 2 lines of regular expressions. But that is not the interesting part for me, when he sent me the new code he pointed out that I "always make things difficult" when they do not have to be.
My program is an expression of myself. Who I am being when I write software is the same, generally speaking, as when I am with family and friends. When he pointed out to me that I always make things more difficult, one of the first things that came to mind was that a very dear friend had said the same thing to me the night before.
When someone comments on my code or my coding stle, they are commenting on who I was being when I wrote that code. It is an extension of how I choose to express myself under that particular situation.
By opening the source I can have the inquiry with the world with amazing results. What happens when you are open to the possibility of allowing others to contribute to not only your program but yourself in the process.
Semper Fi,
Wayne Pierce
Former SGT USMC
PS: I am MUCH better with firewalls now.
----
wpierce at athenasecurity dot com
VP of Technology
Athena Security
Information Security is a process, not a product.