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Sun Offers Reward Program to Boost Open Source Effort
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wed Dec 05, 2007 01:47 PM
from the taking-care-of-the-grunts dept.
from the taking-care-of-the-grunts dept.
e5rebel writes to tell us that Sun Microsystems has announced they they will be creating a reward program in order to compensate open source programmers for their work in a hope to boost open source efforts. The program will involve communities like OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSPARC, NetBeans, and OpenOffice.org according to Simon Phipps, Sun's open source officer. "Phipps' post comes some months after Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software, voiced skepticism over the open-source status quo, where developers who contribute to various efforts go uncompensated while corporations are enriched. 'It really is a worrisome social artifact,' Green said at the time. 'I think in the long term that this is a worrisome scenario [and] not sustainable. We are looking very closely at compensating people for the work that they do.'"
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Submission: Sun promises prizes to boost open source effort by Anonymous Coward
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Most open source will come from India??? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would we outsource open source software? Is there really that little interest in FOSS in the US, EU, etc.?
Never let reality temper imagination
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This is unlikely, near term (Score:2)
The developer community in India is not that large; computer ownership is 14 per 1000 people, which is barely over 1%, compared to them having ~5.2% of the population with cable television [Source: http://blogs.officialexportguide.com/country/ [officialexportguide.com]].
Add to this the fact that most of the ownership of these machines is centralized, either in large corporations as business equipment, software shops where the employee only has access to work on what the software shop wants worked on, or c
Re:Most open source will come from India??? (Score:5, Funny)
Does anyone know where can I contribute money to help revitalize Pakistan's nuclear weapons program?
Parent
Value of money (Score:2, Insightful)
In either case, an economic reward for working on free software won't change much, as we are already fully "compensated", or otherwise economically secure and using free software as a hobby
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Why would we outsource open source software? Is there really that little interest in FOSS in the US, EU, etc.?
My guess is this has nothing to do with generosity towards open sources at all. It probably has more to do with issues like OpenDS where owners of the project more or less got strong armed/fired. Sounds like developers are not happy at Sun and perhaps this is a subtle message to those developers at Sun.
A large still falling tech company I used to work for in 1995 brought in "cheap" Indian pr
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Now, what I would expect is that, because of the current economy, developers in India would demand lower fares to do the same amount of work as developers in the US or UK. Because of this, I think that companies wanting to do such kinds of offers (to give money to open source products) could do it via coding [rentacoder.com]
Re:Most open source will come from India??? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, he states that he believs that most of the expansion in open source programming will be in India. Considering raw population numbers and development trends, that's probably not an entirely unreasonable assumption.
The US and Western Europe, for instance, probably have as a high a percentage of their population programming as they are going to have, and the split between open source and proprietary is probably pretty stable (not that it won't change over time, but there is a lot of inertia built in).
India has quite a lot of people, is seeing lots of growth in the tech field, and is a lot more fluid in how the structure of its tech industry will shake out. So, yeah, lots of growth in open source development is likely there, and spending any given amount of money to encourage that growth is likely to have a lot more effect there, not only because of the greater practical value of the same amount of money in India, but because a lot less of India's programmers or potential new programmers are entrenched in an existing system and unlikely to change their behavior without a major incentive.
Parent
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I think it's a matter of best bang for your open source buck. It's pretty obvious. People have a finite amount of time and some proponents of open source forget that whenever you spend time, that is time you're not spending doing something else like working for $, etc. So I think it's a very astute observation on the part of Sun's management and also a very intelligent move in understanding th
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Last time I checked there are freaking TONS of people literally dieing to get in to this country. So many that the U.S. is building a wall to stem the flow of illegal immigration. Yes those are generally lower educated people but there are still far more "high tech" people wanting in the county than H1Bs.
You seriously want people to believe that the U.S. is run by a bunch of "Religious Fanatics"? The same country that based its laws off of Christian values and relig
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That's true. That's yet another problem with the US... they were dependent on the uneducated but industrious illegals to harvest food, and now that they're locking things down and throwing immigrants i
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To the limits of statistical significance, this never happens. Pretending that it does is part of the great American myth.
The United States is not the greatest nation on earth, except when it comes to rich people making tons of money bombing far away poor people - we're definitely the greatest at t
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I wouldn't have put it in such an inflammatory way, but yeah.
Put another way, the U.S. is a good country., but that doesn't mean it can't be better. Instead of resting on our laurels---instead of being proud of ourselves for not being worse---we should be looking at the things that are wrong and trying to improve upon them, constantly setting the bar higher and higher. Otherwise, someday we'll look back and compare ourselves with the world and find ourselves at the bottom.
But Sun is already doing that... (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess Sun is trying to find a way where they can pay people to work on their projects without directly being employed by Sun. The advantage for Sun would be that they wouldn't have to fire people or pay health or other benefits, and it might be easier to recruit people. The advantage for the programmers would be flexibility in how many hour they want to put into a particular project. And, if Sun doesn't prevent it, that they might be paid twice for doing the same job. Once by their main employer, who pay them to implement a specific feature they need in a project, and once by Sun for doing the same thing.
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http://www.gregspotts.com/main/2005/05/seacode_inc_aim.html [gregspotts.com]
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/062705widernet.html [networkworld.com]
But, also, see (also from 2005):
Outsourcing Losing Luster:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/supercomm.html [networkworld.com]
Taking into account human nature (Score:4, Insightful)
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Sounds like what Ruby Central does... (Score:2)
And yup, the grant PDF file is missing, I've emailed them about it.
Compensating People.... (Score:2, Interesting)
On the one hand, it's the right thing to do. On the other, I will be shocked if it is a living wage for a developer living in the EU/US.
good pr (Score:3, Interesting)
This is a sharp turnaround from when all unix variants competed with each other.
Great news! (Score:4, Insightful)
Mind you, can't see Sun paying for people to write drivers for other people hardware...shame.
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"Dives of the large Emperor Penguin have been recorded which reach a depth of 565 m (1870 ft) and last up to 22 minutes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penguins [wikipedia.org]
Oh, before somebody writes in that "we'd have good drivers if OEMs would only release their binaries", it (mainly) was a joke, guys...
I'll happily take money for the boring bits (Score:4, Insightful)
There are a lot of tasks that I'll do for a paying employer, that I dislike enough to avoid when I'm doing development Pro Bono.
An honorarium might make it palatable to do really really boring stuff (;-))
--dave
I'm in. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm currently undergoing a major project (for me, anyway) involving LTSP in education, and I would *gladly* give some of my profit back, especially for bug fixing specific issues that I run into, as well as general profit-sharing with the people who work on LTSP. I am making money off of open source, and I feel it only honest and right to share it with those who have worked so hard to make it what it is today.
Sun FTW!
Re:Please don't (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Please don't (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Little bags of green shrinkwrapped to dvd's with slogans such as "Sun. Don't you want to get nicely toasted?" or "Sparc it up!"
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I got the same thing yesterday. They noted that i'd downloaded part of the install, and didnt complete it... (it was over a Gig). Anyway, they promised $50 in restaurant vouchers if I completed the download and did the install. I finished the download
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Please pay me,
--an open source author.
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Th
Look at the F/OSS Boss, same as the old Boss (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Please don't (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that someone is offering money for OSS development doesn't really take anything away from the people that have their own strong interests that no one is offering money for. It might even broaden the community of people willing to work on OSS without pay, since there'll be a limited number of paid gigs available, and the best way to qualify yourself for them is to get intimately familiar with the software for which they are offered -- and the best way to do that is to actually work on it.
This presumes that the pool of programmers who will work on OSS is fixed, so that whoever takes the pay is coming out of the pool of people who would otherwise do it for free. But making money available means that you are more likely to pull people who otherwise wouldn't work on OSS into the OSS development world.
Plus, a whole lot of OSS development is done for pay now, by paid employees of firms like Sun, IBM, etc. Heck, offering bounties for particular features from the community isn't new, either.
How does this work? Getting paid to work on a feature in, say, OpenJDK doesn't make you less capable of turning around and implementing an open source project (for free or paid for by a competitor) that might challenge Sun's Java.
If anything, it makes you more capable of doing that, if you were inclined to do so.
Parent
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If Sun wants to give some compensation to the developers that have helped them make money, and the developers don't mind accepting, what's wrong with it? It is certainly fair.
Re:Monetization of labor (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
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I have no doubt that a 1983 level of effort in open source is quite sustainable, the question is whether a level of effort necessary to continue open source's market share is sustainable.
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Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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It improves the quality and attractiveness of software for which they sell professional support, services, etc.
Genius (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe it or not, the entire Open Source industry is based on this logic. Companies spend big bucks creating or extending OS software. Usually they just hire programmers to do it, but offering prizes to eager volunteers is better publicity, and much cheaper.
Parent
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Most of all he emphasised the price (£0!) of all the software we (the students) could download for free from Sun, like OpenSolaris etc, etc. I thought this was strange -- every PC here already runs Linux (about half are dual boot with Wind
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By encouraging quality alternatives to MS (Score:3, Insightful)
(Let's pretend Apple doesn't exist so I can save some keystrokes here.)
Sun wants to encourage continued improvements in the quality and versatility of what people can get without paying MS. This way, people can continue to buy non-Windows computers, Java continues being relevant, and MS works harder to produce (or at least to tollerate) useful innovations because they have credible competition to keep them honest.
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From TFA: "I'm announcing it in India because that's where I expect the greatest open-source community growth to come from in the near future. ... If we can play a part in catalyzing the emergence of India as a key international open source power-house, the effect on the software industry will be huge."
:cry:
Great, now open source software will go downhill due to bad programming and bad UIs
Don't worry, we'll still have fast & reliable tech-support... oh wait.