Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? 162
An anonymous reader writes "IBM, Sun, Novell, and Red Hat all have a very significant open source element to their businesses. In addition to these juggernauts, there is growing investment in various open source models. Will money flowing into open source destroy its roots? Mark Hinkle just posted an editorial asking the questions Is Commercialization Killing Open Source? in which he comments on 'opensville' and gives some actual investment data, and a lot of insight into the growing trend in 'open source commercialization'. Is there such a thing as 'too much money' when it comes to developing software?"
Just ask Clippy or Madden 200X (Score:5, Interesting)
Just like the movie industry, you're pushed to release sequels as frequently as possible even when you really don't have anything new or innovative to release.
Re:Just ask Clippy or Madden 200X (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Just ask Clippy or Madden 200X (Score:5, Insightful)
The issue isn't about whether too much money or commercialization is killing open source software (culture/roots/projects). It seems to me that the root cause has to do with the nature of the widely publicized open source projects. As open operating systems (Linux, NetBSD, etc.) and applications (Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) grow in complexity, they outstrip the abilities of ad hoc, grass roots "open source" organizations to develop and maintain them.
Simply put any serious, valuable, widely-used open source project today is very likely a large and complicated one. Open Source has outgrown its own infrastructure and the only one available that can pick up the projects and move them forward are those operated by commercial organizations with the resources to throw at these hard problems.
Re:Just ask Clippy or Madden 200X (Score:4, Insightful)
As projects become larger and more complex, they outstrip the ability of anything but a decentralised network of programmers. The resources of a traditional centralised software company, even the biggest in the business, is nothing compared to what decentralised networks of programmers have. The linux kernel team being one excellent example. And commercial software houses - *many* of them - are definitely involved, but the model is still distributed. No single company could handle that task - a widely distributed team from all around the world, with both commercial and noncommercial interests contributing, can and does.
Projects that attempt to decentralise their development while still retaining a monolithic structure internally may find that doesnt work so well, of course. For this to work the project must follow the 'unix way' and have many more-or-less self contained modules that work together, rather than building monolithic do-everthing apps. Not everyone seems to grok that yet, but give it time.
Re:Just ask Clippy or Madden 200X (Score:4, Insightful)
The 'unix way' is great, don't get me wrong, but it's now reached the stage where there should be a central body saying "Here are various behaviours, you should use these switches to achieve them. Here is how you should format your output. If this happens, throw this specific error." and so on. People, especially businesses, don't like to have to learn the nuances of every individual app because the developers use -E and not -e.
Re:Just ask Clippy or Madden 200X (Score:4, Interesting)
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You are completely right on that. Just have a look at the Eclipse framework (yes, I'm a Java user), and you'll see this executed in a very clear way. It's a complete set of modules. Even the base install contains many tens of modules. The number of plugins available for Eclipse
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There are many, many types of systems that do not lend themselves to the "million monkeys" approach to systems engineering. Grafting one-off utility programs or plug-ins or other modular elements onto a large, central framework (be it an O/S, and IDE, a web browser, graphics tool or any other modular app) is not anything like the design and en
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Solaris, OTOH, has always been developed as a centralized project. Not many people would say that Solaris is really superior to Linux at this point. Perhaps it was simply not well run?
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What has open source accomplished that Microsoft didn't accomplish 10 years in advance?
I'll name one - deliver a system that can stay up and functional for years at a time. This crappy enterprise Microsoft Windows XP "Professional" I'm typing on can't seem to stay alive more than a few days at a time. Bah. Rebooot this year or next year, it shouldn't matter. Rebooting every few days is unprofessional. The first time I got +1 year uptime on a Linux system in production use was with Linux kernel 2.0.6. Date that and remember that over that time period that system also survived the great
MS the creator of all things good? (Score:2)
Pretty much everything. Those open source projects that didn't pre-date the MS versions were easily coded afterwards in somewhat less than 10 years. It's not as if MS was the original innovator anyway. Did Internet Explorer come out 10 years before Netscape? Is MS not copying ideas for their browser from Firefox now? Come on! They wrote their spreadsheet after Lotus123. Their word processor after Word Perfect. Where is th
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As a GNOME fan (Score:5, Insightful)
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And "free" is not the same as "open source". Your grandma paying a few bucks with her computer to help set it up or answer her support calls is the service you're supposed to get when you buy a computer and get software with it. In
As a developer and a fan... (Score:5, Insightful)
Without money flowing in to OSS, fewer people will be able to do useful work.
Sure there is a perception of OSS being written by the selfless hackers giving all their spare time. In reality though, people need to eat, pay the rent and buy computers etc. When organisations fund OSS development they help make it real. OSS businesses have found various ways to make money and do so in various ways.
Re:As a developer and a fan... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now that I'm an adult and have a family to support I really wish I could get back into the game. I know I could really make a useful contribution. I'm am much more experienced, have vastly more knowledge and am thus in a much better position to contribute.
I just don't have the time anymore. Now I'm profit driven. My kids need to eat. The only way I see myself doing open source work is if I get paid for it. I wish I had more time to devote to hobbies but I spend 100% of my professional life sitting at a computer and so my hobby time is reserved for non-computer tasks.
So if companies can take people that are in my position and enable them to contribute to the community then that can only be a good thing.
It happens organically (Score:5, Insightful)
That's our worth, freedom will always be more than a career path
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Re:As a developer and a fan... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:As a developer and a fan... (Score:4, Insightful)
Without money flowing in to OSS, fewer people will be able to do useful work.
Sure there is a perception of OSS being written by the selfless hackers giving all their spare time. In reality though, people need to eat, pay the rent and buy computers etc. When organisations fund OSS development they help make it real. OSS businesses have found various ways to make money and do so in various ways.
With things like Red Hat where they are making money out of the source it's not so clearly beneficial, because conflicts of interest arise. If Red Hat can get more money for support by making things more complex or more likely to break they will; they're no longer necessarily in it to improve things, but to make money. When the two objectives are the same things improve, and have improved, but when they're not you get things like security patches being sold.
Re:As a developer and a fan... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If Red Hat can get more money for support by making things more complex or more likely to break they will
That would make sense if they charged per incident or per hour, but not with a yearly subscription fee. The more time they spend actually doing support, the less money do they make. In addition, support includes much more than a helpdesk line. It can include customization, integration, etc, not to mention the effort in staying binary compatible throughout the lifetime of a product.
I completely agree (Score:5, Insightful)
Gnome is a big project. There is a lot of code, and a lot of it is showing its age. If Gnome was an all volunteer effort, there would be a lot more focus on exciting new technologies, and less focus on fixing bugs and cleaning up old code. In a sense, this is how I see KDE. KDE is pushed forward by developing new projects and applications, but to a certain degree suffers from the fact that things are constantly being reinvented rather than refined. The hard work that has gone into Gnome by commercialization has helped reduced bugs in the code, kept it up to date, and continues to push the project forward.
Re:I completely agree (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I'm not that familiar with the KDE toolkit beyond being a KDE user, but I'd say the Qt toolkit is certainly being highly refined by Trolltech. With the release of Qt4, pretty much the whole KDE project has gone into a big upgrade cycle, with KDE4 out in late October. So while it might seem KDE progress has been slow in the last year or two, I think it will raise the bar when it arrives.
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As I read it, she/he was referring to the fact that GNOME is less upgrade driven and more bug-fix/stability/footprint driven due to different target devices/users.
I may be wrong, but what do I know, I use kde or windowmaker
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But is that a good thing? Take OpenBSD vs Linux, it doesn't take much to see which is more popular. Certainly if it gets to the point where it's so unstable to the point of being unusable, things are different but I don't think people really care that much. Explorer.exe crashes from time to time too, then it restarts itself and it's still fairly p
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Closed...wallet (money)
GPL......heart (community)
BSD......mind (technical excellence)
The IT ecology is has an operating point in some abstract venn diagram with lots of overlap between the three.
Let the good times roll, and leave the religion in your community of faith.
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People overlook a logical, dispassionate, tolerant mindset when considering licensing, and their subjective affirmations on questions like 'property' and 'ethics' get in the way of a pragmatic consideration of reality.
Probably. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Probably. (Score:5, Funny)
Sure there is [wikipedia.org], though as I write this, its utility is questionable...
Yes, there can be too much money. (Score:3, Funny)
But no. Now we have a 6 hour golf meeting every day for all employees, Caviar and wine spewing drinking fountains.
I heard rumors of $1000 a hour hooker fridays starting next month!
Morale is high, but productivity has dropped way down.
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I think I know who just set the record for employee referral bonuses for his HR department this quarter....
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Guess I had the wong dotcom... (Score:2)
The dotcom I did time with didn't waste their venture money in an obvious fun way... no, my dotcom took the money seriously and made the product more complex, all in the name of "raising the bar for competition", to make the Intellectual Property more unique, etc...
Of course that just ruined a simple "good thing", and it become bloated and so expensive that nobody wanted it...
eh? (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, some things will be dominated by commercial needs, they kind of have to be to compete. Anyone who pretends surprise and wants it to be otherwise is deluding themselves.
I've been an Open Source coder for six years now. Last time I checked the state of Red Hat et al made not a mote of difference to my project. I'm pretty certain that I'm not alone.
Re:eh? (Score:4, Informative)
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Erm... Since the big name OSS software (Firefox, OpenOffice, GCC, etc.) were all written mostly by people employed by those big players?
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According to Linus many eyes make all bugs shallow.
Its the collaboration that makes Free and Open Source software great, not "key developers in big projects"
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Not so clear to me... are you saying the pay has had a bad effect on the linux kernel ?
OpenOffice started life as proprietary software and i doubt it will ever recover, so i dont think its a good example.
It really comes down to intent doesn't it, some (well, a few) companies accept the responsibility that comes with it, but i guess most just see it as something to exploit. So its not the money thats bad, its
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For it to be the backbone implies they system would collapse without them.
Which would be more damaging to the open source software;
a) Key developers in key projects no longer get funding from commercial interests.
b) The hundreds of thousands of volunteers cease their contributions
I think its volunteers that are the backbone, commerc
Are Micro-Breweries Killing Beer? (Score:5, Interesting)
As we all on
Or did it offer many people the chance to experiment and introduce new types and varieties of beer to an entirely new audience?
Sure, as the the Giant Commercial Software Shops have participated in the process, they have occasionally Big Footed their way through some issues.
Sure, as they have ponied up large numbers of developers and other resources to promote their vision of Open/Free Source, they have inflected the growth and adoption rates of Linux, et al.
But would anyone seriously suggest, for all the real difficulties this has caused, and will cause in the future, without the HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS that the Giants have poured into the world of Free/Open Source, that its adoption, growth and technological improvment would be anywhere near where it is now?????
They Pays Their Monies and They Takes Their Chances.....
I'd say we're all much better off with them, than without them. And those of us who want to work on porting LINUX or Java to our favorite Zilog 80 platform, can spend as much time as we chose to do so. Our own pet projects are, as always, up to to us.
As individual developers and contributors, we are as, "Free to Choose", as we have ever been.
Opensource = Free Speech (Score:5, Insightful)
Disclaimer... I personally can't program worth a crap. I get lost in my own 25 line shell scripts so I have to donate in order to contribute (go elive!)
Sinple solution (Score:3, Interesting)
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Sh
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Interesting idea, though. Details can always be worked out once the initial idea has been put forth.
Re:Simple solution (Score:2)
In part, I was thinking o
It's going to happen (Score:3, Insightful)
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Ironically, this is the very reason why I anyway have had reservations about version 3 of the GPL; because of the idea of the FSF incrementally adding more and more restrictions to how licensed software can be used over time. I thought it was particularly telling when I found out that projects hosted on Savannah are not allowed to limit
Good Question, weak article (Score:2, Insightful)
But in general I think the question of what influence all the money coming into the open source community will have is a good one. If, as is increasingly the case, OSS becomes a key component in the businesses of multi-billion dollar corporations, those corporations will seek to control open source development to protect their investment.
If
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Indeed it's a good question. But the problem is not the corporations that "leech off" open-source. It's when they start hiring all the good coders.
No (Score:4, Interesting)
No, open source is growing (Score:3, Insightful)
Spending money is orthogonal to openness. Mainstream money has simply increased the size of the pie.
As open source becomes more mainstream more mainstream companies more money will get involved. No surprises there.
Niche programmers with free time will continue to scratch their itch. No surprises their either.
The two groups exist together quite happily. Most open source programmers want their work to become more mainstream.
It's only when companies try to do an end-run around open licenses that there's problems and that's exactly the same issue as proprietary software licenses being abused.
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DRM. You don't control it means you don't own it.
Money flowing into open source? Ha! (Score:3, Interesting)
Without getting too personal, all I will say is that the vast majority money invested into open source is anything but... It's invested into companies that have a handful of people working on a handful of high-profile cases, usually doing a 20% job: 20% on open source, and 80% on projects that actually bring in cash.
Now, back to the article, those links support anything but what the
There's no such thing as too much money (Score:2)
Answer (Score:2)
(well, I can't think of a better response to such a silly question)
Open Source != Free Software (Score:4, Interesting)
In all this discussion of Big Business "Open Source" software let's tip our hats to the thousands of Debian Developers who help keep software FREE. Not just free in monetary terms, free of the stranglehold that big business can place on software development when they decide to move on to the next big thing.
I hope big business keep pumping money into worthwhile open source projects. I really hope they truly support free software. I'm smart enough to know that at least some of these players are only in it to foister some competition against the Microsoft camp and whether that is good enough for the community remains to be seen.
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What about Gentoo, Fedora, Linux From Scratch, Gobolinux, and Blag? (To name but a few other non-commercial Linux distros) Don't they count too?
Debian is *not* the only non-commercial Linux distribution
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Nope, they don't.
You could have taken the hint from the use the parent poster made of capitals. He even did you the favour of explicitly spelling out what he meant. Apparently, you can't read.
Here's an explanation for those who can read: parent poster was referring to Free, as in 'Free Speech', not free as in 'no cost'.
Geez, it is not as if this is a new distin
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Ah. Of course. He meant that Debian is the only distro in existence with explicit approval from Stallman's cult. My apologies for the misconception.
However, with gnuSense, even that is no longer strictly true.
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Geez, it's not as if checking how moronic you sound (hint: very) while resorting to personal attacks on trivia while being badly wrong yourself is a new thing.
esoteric knowledge in the open source community (Score:2)
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Er. (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly what definition of "killing" are we working by, again?
Money won't kill open source, but greed will... (Score:4, Interesting)
Do we need a better reminder than SCO to demonstrate that greed is what would kill open source? And while their recent actions seem limited to their legal battle against Linux, this same company used to be called Caldera (and was selling a Linux distribution of their own).
So, if there is an issue of too much money in open source, it really comes down to whether that money is being justly used to support the development of open source products or if that money is being used to line a greedy manager's/executive's pockets.
Quick answer: No (Score:5, Interesting)
For open source to become more popular, money must flow in. The result is that some projects request donations to keep the project alive.
Now, I'll play devil's advocate for a second - would you prefer a version of Firefox that isn't up to modern standards (i.e. bloated, memory leaks, CPU hog, and won't render properly), or would you spend money to make it the best browser (i.e. lightning fast, lightweight, and perfect rendering)? I've considered allowing you to spend time to help the browser, but a project the size of Firefox isn't something that most programmers can jump into.
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Too easy, I refuse to comment.
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For open source projects to be long-term viable, they have to be more than about the itch of the current moment. This means often you need to have paying customers who pay you to solve their problems. And money flows in this way.
The caveat I would add is that there is such a thing as too much money, though perhaps this is better phrased as "there is such a thing as one entity having too much money." If a company has money, they will
Commercial open source is natural and instinctive (Score:2)
It's ok to put money into these things to advance them and move them along. Money will follow good code that people need (ok, maybe some bad code, t
Commercialization? No (Score:3, Interesting)
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If "destroying its roots" means (Score:2)
False dilemma (Score:2, Informative)
Also, projects aren't 'punished' when companies take the code and run with
Depends what is given back (Score:2)
Also, many drivers for hardware come from employees at large organisations. Without drivers your choice of hardware for Linux would be severely limited.
Partially, yes (Score:2)
It's an interesting problem. I've looked into bounty-offerings from certain pro
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I see this continually with Linux...over and over and over again. It's never about what an individual themselves are doing. Rather, the rule is always, "I am my brother's keeper."
Here's a thought:- Instead of focusing constantly on whether everyone else is "giving back," whether everyone else is being paid
as long as they get the licenses right (Score:3, Insightful)
The only real problem I occasionally see with commercial open source is dual licensed software, which may be nominally under an open source license, but is usually run as a closed source project and often has unexpected hidden costs.
Sys-con article from an anonymous reader? (Score:2)
Re:Wasn't the right kind of licence going to fix t (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wasn't the right kind of licence going to fix t (Score:4, Interesting)
I have seen GPL supporters whine and pretend that somehow BSD code in proprietary systems is suddenly no longer free. There was quite a bit of FUD by the FSF regarding FreeBSD, claiming that the FreeBSD Foundation could go private and leave companies locked in. This was of course when FreeBSD was seen as more mature than Linux, and we had the SVLUG making quite a number of outlandish stunts trying to get Linux publicity. So many GPL supporters are pretty well known for publically stating their beliefs are better and all others are simply wrong.
Please remember, leaching to you is a compliment to others. Some of us enjoy doing good work and simply want to be appreciated for it (aka the Beer license).
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The OpenSSH developers certainly complained.
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Re:Wasn't the right kind of licence going to fix t (Score:5, Insightful)
With commercial software, the value is only in it's artificial scarcity. As AOL has demonstrated, we could blanket the earth in install CD's, so the supply/demand price of the software enclosed approaches zero.
I don't see any problem with it (companies using without returning everything/anything). They'll help fix the common roads when it's in their interest to do so. With more companies using OS software, they'll eventually end up using more of the "common roads" too.
Don't worry, they'll get around to it once all this IP nonsense is settled.
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I don't know if usung AOL as a standard is a good thing. Yes, they were 'successful', even to the point of buying TimeWarner, but only because soooo many people are/were clueless.
You have to blanket the earth with good stuff*. Even then, I'm not sure the 'clueless ones' will not screw it up.
* for various definitions of good stuff.
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GP poster is obviously too young to have met AOL or their users back then... Like when they first invaded Usenet. Between the users, the fact that *each* "Me Too" post was posted *twice* for a while, they made a reputation in no time...
Be fair to AOL, they started out with a (Score:2)
better price.
No, Compuserve, and The Well [well.com], were better products. However AOL's marketing beat Compuserve after which AOL bought it and The Well dropped it's access and went to just being an online community instead of also offering access.
FalconRe: (Score:2)
While the animals are consuming something that can be copied infinitely, strangely, they still poop.
I think we can all agree that the poop has been piled pretty high.
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I recently purchased a Mac Mini for my girlfriend a few months ago. I've been playing with it while she's not around [eg: at school]. I've found a lot of things do work okay, however if you want to do anything useful, it usually requires buying a product, trying to compile/port a program from Linux or it's just not easily possible.
A couple of examples: watching a video in Safari(switched to firefox and used the MediaPlayerConnectivity plugin as I use
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