How Long Should an Open Source Project Support Users? 272
Ubuntu Kitten writes "Since October the community-generated database of cards known to work with Ndiswrapper has been down. This is apparently due to an on-going site redesign, but right now the usual URL simply directs to a stock Sourceforge page. Without the database, the software's usability is severely diminished but this raises an interesting question: Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users? If so, for how long should the support last? Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites. While developers can sometimes find sponsorship, is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?"
Obvious answers (Score:1, Interesting)
Is an open source project obliged to provide support for its users?
A. No
Web servers cost money, especially for popular sites.
A. Advertising can pay for this, especially for popular sites
While developers can sometimes find sponsorship,is it possible to get sponsorship simply for infrastructure and user services?
A. Yes if there is actual significant demand.
No support is needed (Score:4, Interesting)
You should read any open source license, a project does not have to support you at all and I think that it's kind of selfish that you expect it.
Open Source Support (Score:3, Interesting)
As an open source author, this is a difficult question. I can't "support" people who don't pay me. Period.
If I had a bigger project that had some sponsors, maybe I could. As it is, I can't even work on my projects on a regular basis. Currently, I just make what I need for my own purposes, and make it generally available to others. The community support we hope for is almost non-existent on most of the open source projects.
Sure, the Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL, et. al. get lots of attention and some funding, but the vast majority of projects are just one or two guys (gals?) writing what they need and sharing.
Support for open source? No. However, I see no reason to take down an existing site to create a new one. Even if you have only one machine, you can still handle two sites.
Open Source responsibility (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfunded hobbiest resources have absolutely no "responsibility" to stay in operation.
It would be nice if they made an effort for someone else to take over the project, but in the end, it's their pet project to do with (or kill off) as needed.
It's the same as a commercial product, except when the company can't fund it any more, they can simply drop it and the users are really SOL. They don't necessarily open it up for the general users.
Of course, when something happens, people complain. One of the things I do is run a news site. We ask for, and appreciate donations, which remove the ads from the page. We get a few (a very few). If/when things happen, people complain. If they don't get their nightly newsletter, they complain. If they can't get to the site, they complain. If something happens to the server, they complain. The revenue from ads and donations don't cover the most basic of costs. They wouldn't even cover the power consumption of the server, much less bandwidth, hardware upgrades, SSL cert renewal, domain renewals, etc, etc.
The biggest reason that I keep running it is because it's parked on my personal web server. I have quite a few things tucked away on there, that I use frequently from wherever I may be sitting. If one day I decided to stop running the news, and put up a notice saying it's all gone, then that's the way it is. There is no "responsibility" to open source my code, redirect my domain to another source, or anything like that. Luckly, I run it because I like it. My thousands of readers like it. Maybe someday it will even support itself, but until then, if I decide to shut down the server tomorrow and never turn it back on, I have no obligation to do anything.
Re:Answer: no (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, University of Chicago economics have done systematic analysis of the financial records of on-the-street drug dealers in the US, and have used the empirical evidence to fairly conclusively prove that drug dealers use a franchise business model. That is, drug dealers use the same basic business model as McDonalds. I think you're confusing sales practices with business models.
More info so you can look it up yourself: http://www.amazon.com/Freakonomics-Economist-Explores-Hidden-Everything/dp/006073132X [amazon.com]
Ndiswrapper isn't typical. (Score:3, Interesting)
The OP gives Ndiswrapper as a specific example, but asks a general question, and so far all the replies have been about the general question.
What about the specific situation of Ndiswrapper? There's a saying that "bas cases make bad laws," and Ndiswrapper is sort of like that -- it isn't a typical example of OSS.
Okay, first off let me say that I have two machines on my home network that have Ndiswrapper on them, and I'm grateful that it exists, because it saved me from having to drill holes through my hardwood floors and pull cables from the downstairs to the upstairs.
However, I'd be surprised if anyone had ever been under the impression that Ndiswrapper was anything more than a horrible, nasty, dirty kludge with no future ahead of it. The basic problem is that the manufacturers of the wifi cards don't disclose the relevant technical information that would allow third parties to write drivers, and they also don't support operating systems other than Windows. Anything the OSS community does to try to work around that is bound to work badly and be unsatisfactory. I've already seen that any time I upgrade from one release of Ubuntu to the next, wifi breaks, and I have to go back through all the steps of installing the drivers again. There's also the problem that binary blobs make it difficult to debug kernel crashes.
All of these problems show that ndiswrapper has always been nothing more than a band-aid, and nobody should have ever expected it to have a future.
The only real solution for the future is to spread good information about what cards work with OSS (no binary blobs). The FSF has some info here: http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wireless/cards.html [fsf.org] . The trouble I always have with this kind of situation is that these online lists are always out of date and inaccurate, and they also tend to systematically overstate the quality of support, e.g., when you I the OSS driver, I can't get it to work at all, or if I do get it to work it crashes all the time, or the full functionality isn't supported.
This is all qualitatively different from the situation where you just have an OSS project that doesn't have ongoing support. A more typical example of that kind of thing would be sox, which is a command-line utility for converting sound files between different formats, adding effects, and playing sounds. Its author hasn't been supporting it properly for a long time, so less and less of its functionality is working on, e.g., a fresh install of ubuntu. It's gotten to the point where, for me, it's basically useless. But that's no big problem, because other people have picked up the slack by writing similar software to replace it. The difference with Ndiswrapper is that the problem is more fundamental. The things that make Ndiswrapper a kludge are inherent to its purpose, which is to be a kludge.
Re:Open Source Support (Score:5, Interesting)
encourage more people to donate
I think, in all honesty, that is a wet dream. While I am a "Free Software," not just open source, developer I am neither a socialist nor a communist. In over 12 years of doing it and, at times, very actively contributing, I have *never* gotten a donation. At one point I had over a thousand users. It just isn't going to happen. Unless you have a *big* project that a lot of "big" companies use, you ain't making money off it. (As per my original qualification that any aggregate generalized trend will have a few exceptions)
I am a capitalist with a sense of social responsibility. I write what I need, share it if it does not harm my business to do so. I do this as a way to "give back" to the free software environment that enriches me. I have come to expect nothing more from it. If, per chance, I develop something that snowballs and makes me rich, whoo hoo! but I won't bank on it.