I'm not good enough to work on open source software

http://journal.dedasys.com/2012/03/22/im-not-good-enough-to-work-on-open-source-software

by davidw • 14 years ago

81 73 14 years ago

journal.dedasys.com

davidw9• 14 years ago

I wrote this after the 'PG has lost the plot' thread. I didn't like the title, but the content was fairly good. People really seem to have trouble visualizing "that which is not seen":-)

eli_gottlieb7• 14 years ago

Bravo and bingo. These are the exactly the frustrations I tend to feel as an unpaid, open-source coder.

And the next level of the phenomenon is that the entire software industry has shifted its business model to avoid having to compete with piracy or open-source. There are now, to my knowledge, two major for-profit companies building their own PC operating systems: Microsoft and Apple. There are four or five building mobile operating systems: Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, Google, (maybe) Symbian. The number of for-profit IDEs and programming platforms is still mostly healthy, but much, much smaller than it once was.

"That which is not seen"? That is, the effect of this privative of profits on the real world? Almost whole fields have shifted over into the domain of unpaid, spare-time open source work. Thousands, millions of man-hours are expended for no salary and no equity.

Think what would happen if all the open-source programmers (paid and unpaid) went on strike. Now you're realizing the economic value of open-source code that goes completely uncaptured by its producers.

Yes, the result is that less gets done, because everyone has to find day-jobs, and that the software industry has changed almost entirely from product business models to service business models.

Now, another scary thought: what if someone stole the code and databases to your web-service? You say that your contacts and relationships are what really makes your web-app worth something, but frankly, that's a load of crap. I'm sure there are some starving Chinese coders who would love to steal your code and your data, bring up their own web-service identical to yours (but in Chinese), get a few million users, and then translate theirs back into English for North American and European usage.

The "relationships and business expertise" excuse sounds much like what everyone said when America sent its manufacturing overseas: "We'll do all the high-value services and design and development work here." Well, no, the manufacturing was itself high-value and the other high-value points in the supply chain eventually followed it, and we're China's bitch now.

There is an imperative to enable value-creators to capture some portion of the value they create as cash. Otherwise the entire foundation of not only capitalism but all possible market economies breaks down into mush.

bunderbunder3• 14 years ago

I think it might be instructive to think of what the world was like before the idea of letting people who create intellectual products maintain some ownership of (and therefore be more able to make a living from) their work:

- Serfdom was still legal in most of Western Europe.

- Professional artists occupied the same social rung as prostitutes.

- An intellectual professional's primary option for making a living off his (that pronoun being sufficient for the era) work was patronage.

- The vast bulk of intellectual output served the primary purpose of glorifying the political and religious Powers that Be.

Of course that doesn't imply that the current copyright and patent law isn't enormously out of hand, or that it doesn't largely function to the detriment of creative professionals thanks to the grotesque ways in which it has been amended over the past three or so centuries. But the basic idea is admirable, and it can and should be salvaged.

cynicalkane• 14 years ago

Now, another scary thought: what if someone stole the code and databases to your web-service?

This exactly.

It's easy for a community oriented around mostly around things like webapps, SaaS, enterprisey stuff to hop on the anti-IP bandwagon. It just so happens that there's no convenient ways of pirating their software.

gte910h4• 14 years ago

Why do OSS full time? Release libraries that are better maintained by a community than a company and do your day job.

msie• 14 years ago

Ugh, I hate the use of the Chinese as the boogeyman.

smsm426• 14 years ago

Just a data point for you to consider - US and China have roughly equal manufacturing output now, despite US being in recession last years and China having 4 times more people. That is if we compare whole population, if we compare manufacturing sector it is 10 times difference in employees. So US workers right now are on average about 10 times more productive than Chinese workers (note I do not mean to imply anything bad about China or Chinese people - it's just statistical facts that do not reflect on anybody personally :). I would not describe this situation as "we're China's bitch" just yet. Prooflink: http://www.manufacturingdigital.com/news_archive/tags/us/chi...

Of course, China would improve. I hope so would US.

billswift• 14 years ago

Of course, another factor is how ending copyright might redirect a lot more resources into open source. Without being able to benefit from rents that come from keeping proprietary code, how many companies would switch to using and improving open source alternatives?

davidw9• 14 years ago

It's very easy and simple to pay $100 to use some bit of software. It's way harder to actually contribute to it meaningfully.

Software markets solve a coordination problem. Not perfectly, but reasonably well. Same thing goes for many other kinds of information goods. No way would I pay an author to sit around writing a book, but I'm happy to give them $5 for a copy.

bunderbunder3• 14 years ago

Mine certainly wouldn't, because we would likely go out of business if people stopped paying us for the software that we create.

j_baker2• 14 years ago

As someone who has been paid to work on OSS, let me say that it is absolutely not about skill. Most notably, Google and Mozilla pay plenty people to work on Firefox and Chromium. Even Apple has some OSS projects (Webkit and Darwin come to mind).

davidw9• 14 years ago

It was a bit tongue in cheek - I have actually had paying gigs working on open source in the past.

But the point about where the money comes from stands - Google's money comes from their proprietary stuff.

I actually think something like Google is a pretty good way to produce open source software, by the way, but it's made possible by the money made elsewhere.

gcp3• 14 years ago

I'm not sure it was necessary to refer to the "I'm not good enough" thing. It really has little to nothing to do with your point. Because you've just undermined your own example (Guido Van Rossum / Python / Google) above, it weakens your position.

If I get it correctly, your point is that one requires copyright for open source software to be viable, by opening up a revenue stream to support the (free) open source part. This is true.

You can make money form open source on either:

1) Selling alternate, source closed licenses. (MySQL for example) 2) Selling support, consulting. (Red Hat, many others)

(1) requires copyright. (2) maybe less so, but without the open source licenses, which require copyright law to work, the software wouldn't exist to begin with either. Red Hat uses trademarks (which really are similar to copyright) to reinforce their position. So does Mozilla.

gcp3• 14 years ago

Maybe its better to say that "there is no need to be a superstar programmer" to work on OSS. The companies you list aren't known for hiring unskilled workers :-)

j_baker2• 14 years ago

Indeed, but they're by far not the only ones working on OSS. They're simply the most recognizable. I've worked on OSS for companies with far less stellar track records when it comes to hiring.

crcsmnky• 14 years ago

Interesting perspective but I have to say there are quite a few companies working the whole "open source the code, charge for consulting, etc." thing. Just in data alone, Cloudera, Data Stax, Basho, 10gen and Hortonworks come to mind.

My point is that thousands of people get paid to work on open source projects. The project might not be their original creation but they still get to give back by producing something that everyone can use. Isn't that really the point anyway?

EDIT: added a missing 'not'

thekungfuman• 14 years ago

This business model is fairly popular in education. We have tons of open source projects where we COULD run it for free, but sometime we pay for hosting, or consulting, or customization. It seems to work well too.

falcolas• 14 years ago

FIWI, I have personally not heard of a single one of those companies.

To continue the OP's concept, these are likely companies with employee counts in the single or double digits, whereas closed source companies have employees in the 5-6 digit ranges, reinforcing the "I'm not smart enough to get paid writing open source" concept the OP presented.

davidw9• 14 years ago

The problem with consulting is that you first have to have a product. That can take a lot of time and money to produce. Then, if you start consulting, it's all about billable hours. Hours spent fooling around making the product better may not translate, at all, into more money for the company.

antirez4• 14 years ago

I guess that in some way a lot of companies are taking from open source without giving enough back. Open source is much cheaper than proprietary software to produce, a team of a few guys do the work of what would be a much bigger team in a proprietary software, and there is no need to have a profit, paying the developers is enough, so... if companies using open source would give back even a small amount of money...

But maybe some global "fund" should be used or something like that, I don't think that giving to the project you use is going to scale (we don't want a few guys rich, and nothing for all the rest, otherwise it's a company). But then bureaucracy starts to be an issue, who selects the right projects? And so forth. Not trivial.

Or maybe the solution is that if you are an enough large company, hire N open source developers. Like charity there should be a non written rule that most tech corps should follow. Like the 1% rule: hire 1% of your work force to write open source (and probably this would end being a largere return about branding than many ADs large companies run for more money than that).

JoeAltmaier3• 14 years ago

IF open source is The Way, it wouldn't need subsidizing. It sounds like all utopian arguments: If Only everybody came around to the right way of thinking, we'd all be better off.

Sure its true, but it aint gonna happen.

antirez4• 14 years ago

yep, but it's strange because it's hard to think at the whole IT economy of today without open source. The idea of startups itself was completely different. What Unix? buy a license, with proprietary hardware maybe, and then purchase the web server license, and the compiler...

So soon or later it's gonna happen maybe as everything is posing on this base.

ajross3• 14 years ago

I don't think resources are really the problem. There's a ton of money out there that pays for full-time open source developers. Basically all the core contributors of all the "serious" projects (i.e. things shipped in high-revenue-producing contexts) are already on staff somewhere.

It's true that there's a much larger population of people (like me) who want to work full time on open source and would take a job if it was offered. But that just gets to what the linked article is talking about: companies don't generally "staff" free software projects with new hires. They hire the projects that already exist.

So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)

davidw9• 14 years ago

> There's a ton of money out there that pays for full-time open source developers.

I don't know... I'm not sure it's really a ton. And a great deal of it comes from companies that derive their revenue from something else - in many cases, proprietary software. Ubuntu, for instance, is all about Mark's millions made from the sale of Thawte.

> So basically the solution, if you want one of these jobs, is to get off your butt and make something people want. Then give it away. :)

And then hope it's useful to someone who makes a bunch of money via proprietary software or something else that's scarce, and that they hire you. Why not just make something proprietary of your own to be more in control?

jonstjohn• 14 years ago

My company, probably like many, uses a majority of open source software but rarely contributes back. As an aspiring open source developer (several projects in the works, not yet released), this has always felt wrong. Honestly, I haven't really raised it much with my company, though. Guilty as charged, although we've made some movement to release a few bits of code under an open license.

Interesting thing is that we currently give 1% of our profits to an environmental program through Patagonia called 1% for the Planet. Maybe we need a 1% for Open Source where companies can be encouraged to contribute developer or $$ to open source projects. Anybody want to work on that?

antirez4• 14 years ago

"Interesting thing is that we currently give 1% of our profits to an environmental program through Patagonia called 1% for the Planet."

I think you are already doing it right, honestly. If you devolve 1% to whatever non-profit / good cause IMHO it's already enough. The real problem is that most companies will not do anything like that (1% is a lot), otherwise a few 1% to environment, a few 1% to open source, the world wold be a different place, entirely.

jasonlotito• 14 years ago

The article is confusing. He talks about intellectual property, copyright, and open source. He seems to confuse intellectual property and copyright (or at least, use them interchangeably), and seems think that open source and copyright are at odds. That open source licenses rely on copyright indicate this isn't the case.

Maybe I just misread the entire thing, but I honestly don't see the message he's trying to get across. It feels like their is a massive amount of context that is missing from this.

kisielk• 14 years ago

An interesting perspective. I too would like to spend more time writing open source software. The main reason I do not, and something which I think holds true for a lot of people, is that even if our company wanted to open source some of our software it's fairly difficult to do so and of questionable value.

Many of the components and practices in our software are quite specific to our business and environment. They'd just be useless or, worse, an impediment to other people wanting to reuse the software in a different context.

Even if we were to refactor parts of our code base to produce some "clean" components that didn't rely on the specifics of our business or other processes, there are many cases where that would just add to the overhead of maintaining the software for us.

riledhel• 14 years ago

You are understimating the value of your software. You never know who can find your work inspirational or educational, even entertaining.

jdost• 14 years ago

Oddly, in the age of the internet, it is easier for someone to do open source at least part of the time for their employer. With the internet, a lot of the money for web based companies is not from the software itself, but the services the software provides. This allows for the company to open source a large chunk of the code base and still make money to pay the developers. (see things like 37signals/RoR)

aliguori• 14 years ago

I'm paid to work on Open Source full time and have been for the better part of a decade.

I don't really agree with anything the article says. Open Source development is a segment of the industry. Getting a job in Open Source is really no different than getting a job in Game Development, Robotics, or any other niche market.

You generally have to (1) be willing to accept less pay (2) be more flexible about relocating (3) have specialized skills and experience or just get really lucky.

phrontist• 14 years ago

This throws the absurdity of capitalism in our faces: Guido, a guy who developed software that benefits hundreds of thousands even by conservative reckoning, can't work on it full time.

SirDinosaur3• 14 years ago

For those interested in sustaining themselves by making open / libre software, I plan on dedicating my next summer to starting a cooperative for hackers. The basic idea is that if we can create a decentralized ecosystem for exchanging currency, ideas, and goods in an open and cooperative manner, we can solve our needs as hackers without resorting to non-free alternatives. You can find my early planning here: https://github.com/SirDinosaur/hackercoop, and I'd greatly appreciate any questions, comments, critiques on how to make my / our dream possible.

DanBC3• 14 years ago

How do you solve taxes?

SirDinosaur3• 14 years ago

Let's rephrase the question: how do we solve taxes?

kungfooguru• 14 years ago

Why does this have a single up vote?

I'm not good enough to work on open source software

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