Open Source And Responsibility

http://felixge.de/2013/03/07/open-source-and-responsibility.html

by felixge • 13 years ago

54 25 13 years ago

jmathai2• 13 years ago

This is partly why I base the open source software I use primarily on the project's community first and the technology second.

jQuery and PHP are good examples of software which might not be the "best", technically. However their community is rock solid and you can get support or find workarounds to bugs (which might not be fixed soon) pretty easily.

Please don't downvote me for saying something positive about PHP....:)

salvadors2• 13 years ago

The central promise of Open Source is not that you can get workarounds for bugs — it's that you are free to fix any bug yourself (or pay someone else to). Lots of non-free projects have great support too, but when you fall through those cracks there's nothing you can do about it. Open Source gives you a much better promise instead.

jmathai2• 13 years ago

I agree. The appeal is that your options for workarounds are orders of magnitude larger than with non open sourced software. You have a multitude of options...

- Workarounds are still important and easier since the software is more transparent - The communities are larger so paying someone else is easier - Forks exist for a reason - You could fix it yourself

timtadh• 13 years ago

Question for the community: How do people feel about open source projects asking for payment for features? It seems to me that is could be a reasonable request. It seems presumptuous to ask a random person on the internet to do work for you and entirely reasonable to request to paid for that work.

Corollary: are open source authors really responsible for anything? It seems you are responsible for your usage.

wladimir2• 13 years ago

How do people feel about open source projects asking for payment for features?

I agree that it's presumptuous for people to expect features to be implemented for free just because they want it.

It's pretty scary how toxic some open source communities are in that regard, though, with people going as far as flaming because their feature is not implemented yet.

These days I also ask for money to implement specific features in my projects. Of course, the spirit of open source is still to do it yourself and submit a patch/pull request scratch your own itch) but not everyone can do that.

jchrisa• 13 years ago

I would much rather encourage a new developer to contribute, than get a few bucks for a feature. The new developer's involvement is usually worth much more than any amount of money.

wladimir2• 13 years ago

Is that ever a choice, though?

In my experience with open source I've seen two classes of users:

- people that join the community as developer, show interest in the code, just implement a feature/fix and push the patch

- people that demand a certain feature.

It's the second group I ask money from, obviously not the first. But indeed the first group is worth much more to the project.

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Well, RMS has said that its perfectly okay to pay for the creation of software. Generally I think its fine but it gets distasteful if the person paying doesn't want their change/code to be part of the main body of work. That is the whole 'contribute back' issue.

It can be particularly touchy around the whole "person Y pays people X to add features you want, send the features upstream in a pull, maintainer declines, customers of Y's product argue that Y is violating the GPL because their features aren't in the product, Y says 'hey they don't want them', then customers start yelling at maintainer to take them, and then maintainer feels bushwhacked."

sokoloff• 13 years ago

Y only has to make the patches available to Y's customers, and GPL is satisfied/Y is not violating GPL and Y's customers are simply wrong in their argument. (I suspect that you know that.)

The implied "problem", that Y's customers are now essentially running on a private fork, not on the maintainers mainline, is no cause to force the maintainer to incorporate the changes. Forking is one of the freedoms in free software.

pixl972• 13 years ago

A company I contract for develops a commercial software package for an industry. They allow to companies to 'buy' their priority development time for specialized features with the caveat, any feature that is developed is released in their mainline package. There are no forks, which over time would become more and more expensive to maintain. As of this time, I can say the policy has worked well for them.

kstenerud• 13 years ago

I've actually had people give me money to implement specific features they wanted. I'm still not really sure how to feel about it, but it most definitely motivated me to de-prioritize everything else open source I was working on and concentrate on that feature, which would otherwise have remained fairly low priority.

One problem with maintaining open source projects is that you often don't know how difficult it will become to maintain. I have one project that's reached a level of maturity where there are very few issues with it and no new features I want to add. Another is still in beta, and needs a lot of work before it's ready for a final release. And then there's the hell project, which breaks with every new release of Xcode and takes weeks or even months to fix.

As an open source developer, I do want people to use my stuff and have it fulfill their needs. However, I am only one man, with all the failings that entails.

belorn• 13 years ago

Relying on software is always a bit iffy. Be that open source or proprietary software. At best one can off load some on contractual agreements, be that social ones like Debian stable or an paper contracts written and paid with a support company.

However, smart consumers can improve for themselves by choosing more or less future proof software, and this by looking at the project and the project group. Things like community driven, historical stable, and a continuous flow of updates is to me shinning traits of a long term project that one can depend on.

As a side note, I would like to add that people seems more prone to demand features and bug fixes from open source projects than they would out of proprietary software. This is almost exclusive psychological reasons, as people who spend money (initial investment) on something get motivated to not see any fault in the product. Other problems is anchoring that free of charge introduce.

salvadors2• 13 years ago

Assuming that a "proper" Open Source project is one with an active community and commitments to long term development and growth etc., is detrimental to simply getting code out there that people can use. There's often an assumption that even if you're releasing code under a Free/Open license you must want to almost run it like a startup, paying close attention to the needs of your "customers" etc.

But there's a whole other side, where you simply take code you're probably never going to do anything more with ever again, but rather than just letting it die, you set it free for other people to do something with it if they like.

One of the core Freedoms is the freedom to adapt existing code in whatever way you like. If something I've written can have some of its innards repurposed into something someone else needs, and save them a day or two of development in the meantime, then that's every bit as valid as if I create a black-box library that tens of thousands of people use (and expect new features from on an ongoing basis).

IME there is woefully insufficient attention paid to the first of these approaches.

rburhum3• 13 years ago

In my experience, I rely heavily on what I consider "Open Source Karma". There are a handful of projects that I use very frequently and my entire (geospatial) industry relies on. For every single one of those, I contribute something. examples are:

- I maintain an open window to the IRC channel, lurk, and help when possible ( I can go weeks without doing this, too)

- Contribute a single line patch to fix something minor

- Contribute a 1000+ lines of new functionality when I understand the internals.

- Subscribe to the mailing list and spend 3 seconds everyday scanning through that daily digest titles to see if there is something I can comment on that may be helpful.

- Do a presentation about that technology in conferences/meet ups/hackathons/whatever.

- Sometimes even volunteer to spend a few hours helping with a booth of that project in a local conference.

- Watch the Github repo and comment/help with bug reports submissions

- Submit bug reports

What do I get in return?

Putting aside the amazing conversations I have with people far smarter than I and the unusual/rewarding friendships/connections I have made, my Open Source Karma there is off the hook. I get a level of support that cannot be bought. It is the difference between intrinsic/extrinsic motivators.

In the past, I have run into issues that I have been trying to solve myself for days. Then I just went over to IRC to ask for help and in less than 10 minutes I had a patch with a fix/workaround from one of the core maintainers who personally debugged my problem and fixed it. There is no typical commercial paid support package that will get you that.

This is exactly why the project health of an open source component is measured in community size/involvement. If you do something minor to give back, you will get your bug fixed because there are real people behind those projects. Meanwhile, the douchebag that demands his bug gets fixed because there is some "implied responsibility to support your package because you are the father of that project" will get ignored.

caseysoftware• 13 years ago

As the lead to a pair of open source projects - Web2Project and OpenVBX - I sincerely appreciate people who keep an eye on the lists/forums and respond to the basic/101-level questions.

Because of efforts like that, I can focus on the deeper or higher level problems or questions that come up.

If you ever find yourself in Austin, TX or at a Twilio event, let me know. I'll happily buy you a tasty beverage as gratitude. :)

rburhum3• 13 years ago

As somebody that consumes OS like a maniac, thank you! Next time I am in TX I will take you up on that offer :)

felixge3• 13 years ago

+100 to this. Whenever I get a bug report, I check the users Github profile. I spend much more time helping people who are also contributing (to any project, not just mine) than those with no apparent track record.

sebs303• 13 years ago

I guess the whole internet and with it the whole economy relies on this small and bigger contribs. We all should be aware that the internet would be a completely different place if it wasn't for all this free tools, made by a lot of smart people. Calculating this as "Karma" is a well known approach as we are used to think of everything as a kind of exchange of "goods" as taught by traditional economic sciences. However, most approaches seem to take a Zero-Sum exchange into account (I give you X lines of code, you give me y Karma). I think in terms of OS and all the things that come with it, this is wrong. I like to think of all this as a Non-Zero-Sum game, maybe the biggest experiment in Non-zero-Sum-Games ever concluded. The sum and result of all that tools and libs created is much greater than the amount of Karma that can be handed out. I rarely contribute, but from time to time, I file a bug or fork/pull req. a repo, just because it became a normal behavior. I guess I do this just because I can. Keep your Karma and just take my Pull-Request.

rburhum3• 13 years ago

You are interpreting "Karma" in the Reddit/HNs/Whatever-Internet-Social-Site sense. I am not talking about any exchange or point system whatsoever. I mean Karma in the original buddhist definition instead.

rwj• 13 years ago

Demanding that users are available to provide maintenance and feature improvement is a recipe for far fewer projects being released.

agwa• 13 years ago

People who feel entitled to have features implemented for them are wrong (and I agree with the OP about being a "responsible consumer"), but I can't agree with the OP when he says that Tom Dale (the guy who said "open source is a responsibility") is wrong.

The context of Tom Dale's quote is a bug in an open source project that rm -rf'd users' files:

https://plus.google.com/111465598045192916635/posts/Ckmmbjmv...

Does the OP really think open source maintainers don't have a responsibility to try to prevent that? He talks about the warranty clause in open source licenses, but the warranty clause is legalese and it's a far cry from how open source really works. In reality, most open source maintainers take pride in their work and try to avoid causing harm even though the warranty clause would technically let them get away with it.

I like the wording of the GPL copyright notice:

"This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."

I think that captures the spirit of open source much better: legally we have no responsibility, but we're still going to try to make it useful.

felixge3• 13 years ago

> I think that captures the spirit of open source much better: legally we have no responsibility, but we're still going to try to make it useful.

Fully agreed. And I actually think that was TJ's intention when he decided to merge a pull request without review, since he was no longer interested in the particular project.

However, Tom is saying: It's better to do nothing than to risk damage. While that would clearly have been better in this case, I disagree with it. If I have a project I can no longer maintain, and somebody cares to submit a pull request, I'll also merge it. Generally speaking it will do more good than harm.

pixl972• 13 years ago

TL:DR - No one has to fix your problem unless you represent a significant portion of their income.

What I take from the whole article is the author severely underestimates the true cost of software.

FTA: "And while it's not pleasant, this approach has led me to realize, that in some cases, I simply couldn't afford certain software, even so it was offered to me at no charge."

This is all software, open source or not, unless you are paying for the direct development of it. There is plenty of closed source programs that I've seen companies tied up in that the manufacture quit supporting or wouldn't fix that cost tens of thousands of dollars in migration fees. The one benefit of open vs closed is that with open you have the option of posting

"I will pay the first person $1000 to fix X and release the code"

felixge3• 13 years ago

> What I take from the whole article is the author severely underestimates the true cost of software.

I was talking about the "costs of ownership", not the "costs of development". And I'd like to think I understand both.

alexpopescu• 13 years ago

I probably fall in the category of those that think that authors of open source projects do have a responsibility for the code they share and its maintenance.

The main reason I'm saying this is that I feel that the open source world is not an infinite dump area where everyone just throws out code of any quality (in many cases just for having something to add on the 2nd page of a résumé).

This is not to say that authors are required to implement additional features or support a piece of code forever. But trying to deliver as much as the original "promise" of the project and making it clear what's the status of the project is the responsibility of the author. Browse GitHub and tell me how many projects are marked as "defunct" or "abandoned" or "unmaintained". (maybe Github should automatically do this...)

Open Source And Responsibility

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