How To Kill an Open Source Project With New Funding 187
mir42 writes "The OpenSource multimedia authorware project Sophie, formerly hosted by USC Los Angeles, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization, Mellon Foundation, approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal, which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Sophie. Being an OpenSource project, this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub-contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid-off developers started OpenSophie.org trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version. Have others faced similar situations? How would you deal with a situation like this?"
Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not even sure what the question is. So the project is being taken closed source? Or it's still open source but the original developers aren't included in the new plan?
From the description, it sounds like a fork is getting all the monetary attention - not unheard of.
Jahshaka (Score:3, Interesting)
A very similar thing happened to the Open Source video editor Jahshaka. Apparently some very dark interests were involved, because the author had to sign an NDA. Guess what happened later? The project stalled, and the author was forbidden to even talk about it in his own forums. This situation continued for more than a year, with everybody wondering how the project was doing, and why it didn't advance at all.
The peril is not the funding per-se, but the contract. When a company wants to pay you to develop your existing open source software, you need to be wary about NDAs and changes in the contract terms. ESPECIALLY if the company wants to retain the ownership of your work!
Re:Funding didn't kill the project (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like a hostile takeover where the community had no power and their duties were simply outsourced by the player holding all the cards.
For any given open source project, there's some kind of answer to the question of "who owns this thing?". When choosing a particular FOSS product as a key component of a project, you have to be aware of not only the quality of the software but the issues of its community politics.
There is baggage with commercial products also, but it's a different set of equations. (Like, if I rely on the product will they jack up the licensing fee, and is this company too small or too big to give my account the attention it needs, etc.)
Re:Huh? #2 (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's subsitute another better known entity as an example.
"The OpenSource office project OpenOffice, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization Sun approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Open Office. (Having contributed nothing new.) Being an OpenSource project this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid off, developers started FreedomOffice.info trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version."
Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy.
Re:Hang on a sec... (Score:1, Interesting)
It seems to me when you boil everything down to bare essentials. You can be used or be useless.
Now hopefully you get something out of the equation yourself.
I think the author feels burned, and wants to know how to deal, in a way that is good for the community.
But the question remains does he encourage the fork in the project, walk away, or do something less obvious and more brilliant that's buried in one of the other posters minds. Oh. wait this is Slashdot :-)
lol wut? (Score:2, Interesting)
Carnegie Mellon donates moeny for Sophie development. Four years later, it's slow and buggy. Carnegie Mellon donates money to bulgarian group to rewrite Sophie in Java.
What's the problem, exactly?
Oh, and for an example of a similar situation (this time with software that's known), consider the Emacs/XEmacs split. Emacs development was slow, so Lucid paid their employees to work on it and contracted with one of the main Emacs developers (Joe?). RMS didn't like the direction it was taking, the copyright not being assigned to FSF, etc.
funding killed my project (Score:5, Interesting)
i feel your pain! funding killed my project... and herein lies my story
One thing led to another and with intels help we got £4 million from a tier-1 vc in the UK, under the terms that i move to the UK to be cheif evangleist (?). Sounds great right? Well for the first year 75% the funding went into the hands of upper management and their consultants (since upper management were clueless to open source).
Then they close-sourced the project, so with the communities help we tried to wage a war against management to 'open their eyes' and i ended up getting sacked for it - and left stuck in london with my family, wife and kids. And london aint cheap.
After the 2nd year (with no progress at-all, no new releases, and a failed attempt at build a CMS which was nothing to do with our project) eventually i was hired back as a consultant.
I immediatly directed as much of the budget as possible (turned out to be around 2 mil us) into building a fork of the underlying engine in the original project, called the openlibraries, under the LGPL. i took a back seat and directed this while i watched another CEO proceed to build a online video distribution system with the rest of our cash (also nothing to do with our project but whatever) with a goal of eventually getting my stuff back.
In the end i was able to use my consulting fees to buy it all back... for around £50k... only to find out that i had wasted 4 years of my life and was back to where i was when i got the funding. I got some cool tech out of the deal and some cool domains (http://plugin.com/ [plugin.com]) but it has then taken me the better half of this year to figure out how to get the project back off the ground.
so, if nothing at all, you can learn from mmy experiences. open source is not about money its about the people. if you want to build a comercial business then you need to make up your mind from the start.
hope this helps,
Jah Shaka http://www.jahshaka.org/ [jahshaka.org]
Re:"redevelop from scratch in Java" (Score:1, Interesting)
Well considering it was written in SmallTalk, 99% of the world's developers were already alienated anyway.