Sun Says, "Compensate OSS Developers"

krelian writes "Talking at Netbeans Day, Rich Green, Sun executive vice president for software, expressed doubts about the current open source model in which developers create free intellectual property only to have others scoop it up and generate huge amounts of revenue. Green said, '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.'" Green didn't provide any details about how payments from Sun or others might work.

What is this, another FUD article?!

So what, another corporation thinking about the bottom line on behalf of its developers?

I thought the whole point of Open Source was doing good for mankind in general, not categorically for the investors...

Re:What is this, another FUD article?!

It's brilliant. Sun can collect money for starving coders like the mafiaa collecy money for starving artists, what could possibly go wrong?

The License mkes the difference

It's brilliant. Sun can collect money for starving coders like the mafiaa collecy money for starving artists, what could possibly go wrong?

The GPL is what is fundamentally different.

- In case of art/media, paying the MAFIAA toll is the only legal way to get it legally. If you try to get it with another way. The MAFIAA will come after you and sue to death the whole building where you live (including all less than 2yo toddler or recently deceased elderly neighbours on the list of sued people).

- In case of OSS, there's a license called GPL whose purpose is to enforce that no matter what the company try (and the version 3 is about pluging the hole that the company may have tried), YOU will ALWAYS be granted to do whatever pleases you (get the software, analyse the code, modify the code) as long as you transmit further that freedoms along the chain.
If any company ever tries to refrain you to get the code and do whatever pleases you, and tries to force to go only through their paid route, that company is in violation of the GPL and loses the right to use the GPLed code in their applications.

Some company may try to make you pay for the OSS software, but that will never prevent you to get the stuff from the original programmer who developed it for FREE and, while browsing his site to download the code, stumble upon a "donate" button and decide to give him some money or hardware.

The motivation of that programmer is also different.
Companies' main motivation is to make money no matter what they deliver (even if it's crap like in Microsoft's case)
OSS programmer's motivation is to develop the software in the first place, because they're scratching an itch (ie.: the motivation is that they actually need the software. Building a working app that solves their initial problem is what they hope to obtain).... Yeah, that, and pure boredom as featured recently on /.

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These are corporate managers who only have dollar signs in their eyes. They don't see how anyone would possibly develop or create anything without wanting to make MORE money. Sure, some developers end up making money but some don't off of their OSS, yet th

you nailed it

It's not that the OSS model is "unsustainable," but that business managers just don't understand the mindsent behind, say, Debian. They don't understand how it can be that someone would write an app or maintain a distro because they find it enjoyable or gratifying, and so they don't find that model predictable, much less harnessable. And if they can't harness it, it must be suspect, inferior, useless, or about to die.

Businesspeople use greed to motivate--it works, is easily understood, easily harnessed, and reproducible on demand. Offer money, and people will show up to work. But since that's the only tool they have, it's the only one they trust.

It's also why so many businesspeople are instinctively against OSS. FreeBSD or whatever may be more stable and secure in the server room, but they aren't going to rely on something that is maintained by hippy visionary volunteers, even if what they're offering is more relaible than the product sold by the guy from MS or whoever. I really think that a considerable part of the resistance to OSS, whether it be GNU/Linux or OpenOffice or whatever, is on principle, not merit. Businesspeople don't understand or trust a product whose existence isn't dependent on someone's search for money.

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It's not that the OSS model is "unsustainable," but that business managers just don't understand the mindsent behind, say, Debian. They don't understand how it can be that someone would write an app or maintain a distro because they find it enjoyable or gr

Re:you nailed it

Businesspeople use greed to motivate--it works, is easily understood, easily harnessed, and reproducible on demand. Offer money, and people will show up to work. But since that's the only tool they have, it's the only one they trust.

I think businesses would love it if it was a service that was free, and if they needed an extra gear they can throw in some cash. Unfortunately, like the Debian incident putting money in doesn't always make it progress faster. Cash is concrete and transferable. You can't give a person who's lost the spark to program a new spark plug. In fact, there's been cases where a company has become heavy users of something and the developers go tired of acting like their support desk. And they don't want to become tech support just because you're willing to pay them. "Hippy visionary volunteers" are a fickle bunch, even if they produce brilliant software. The trouble is that if they aren't looking for what you have to offer, you have no leverage at all. It just becomes some sort of unmanagable software that's going whereever they want to go, and you can either tag along or fall off. You don't know how to prod or poke it make it suit your business needs without breaking it apart. In that sense, I can understand why they don't like it.

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These are corporate managers who only have dollar signs in their eyes. They don't see how anyone would possibly develop or create anything without wanting to make MORE money. Sure, some developers end up making money but some don't off of their OSS, yet th

Re:What is this, another FUD article?!

I thought the whole point of Open Source was doing good for mankind in general, not categorically for the investors...

Ok, but even so, you have to make it sustainable, and how to do so is still an open question.

There's no doubt in my mind that open source works, and works well. It has produced some great things, but I think we're still figuring out exactly how it works in terms of the economics. Proprietary software is certainly simpler:

1) Write product.

2) People buy it.

3) Profit!

4) Improve product, hire developers, etc..

Or:

2) No one buys it.

3) Go out of business, product goes away.

With open source, things are different... You could create something great, and there's no guarantee at all that you'll get anything back for it. In practice, people don't seem to get screwed that badly, but it's not as tight a feedback loop.

I wrote some more about this several months ago:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/02/03/in- thrall-to-scarcity [dedasys.com]

Re:What is this, another FUD article?!

I believe that a vast majority of software is written not to be sold off the shelf, but custom made for internal use in some company, either by in house developers or by external parties, but still on custom specs.

If you have it developed by an external party, on your specs but with them retaining copyright, the business case for getting an open source license is very clear: no vendor lock-in. It should be no-brainer, except when the externals offer a major price discount for a closed license.

When developing in house, usually no licensing at all is involved, proprietary or OS. But it can still make sense to release internal tools as OSS: for goodwill, and because others may improve your tools for you, and release their changes as well. Since software isn't your main business, there is no harm in sharing some code with other companies (possibly in completely unrelated businesses), but you may well reap some rewards.

So in my opinion, the economic case for OSS is at least as clear as for proprietary software - except in the relatively uncommon case of a company developing software to sell off the shelf.

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Why do slashdotters have this attitude that it's morally wrong for a publicly traded company to try to make profits? I mean seriously guys, that's their JOB! If they bother to do it and be nice to geeks at the same time, we should be thankful that they'r

Re:What is this, another FUD article?!

I thought the whole point of Open Source was doing good for mankind in general, not categorically for the investors...

That's a misconception. People write OSS for all kinds of different reasons, including for profit, and that is great. Sun itself is probably the biggest contributor to open source in existence (with Solaris, Open Office and Java), but they obviously do it because they believe it's good business practice.

I am paid for my own FOSS project

I have been write free/open source software for profit. I'm not talking big projects with many developers here - just a small project with me as the sole developer. This is satisfying because I Believe in free software (that's a capital B). But idealism

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I agree with you for the most part. Some of the GNU "weenies", nowadays, do in fact seem to have huge egos. I won't name names, but a few Three-Letter-Nicknames seem to fit the bill here.

However, I genuinely think the "old-school" hacker ethos of "open s

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I have always thought the point of OSS development was as such :
* Install proprietary OS
* Use proprietary OS
* Mumble against the lack of feature X
* Rant against the lack of feature X
* Code feature X for the proprietary OS
* Mumble when you discover you don'

Re:What is this, another FUD article?!

No, the most important activity now seems to be copyright-enforcement.

OT: Steel formed the basis for the European Union

From wikipedia:

"The European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was founded in 1951 (Treaty of Paris), by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to pool the steel and coal resources of its member-states."

"The ECSC served as the f

Re:What is this, another FUD article?!

Guess what's the most important activity of the 21st century?

Based on the most recent statistics of internet use:
Sending spam and watching porn.

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Yes, steel was critical, but you could say the same for any core commodity. Like, say, oil.
I don't think software development is the 'most important activity' of the 21st century. Software development is merely providing instruction sets to instruments.

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"Software development is merely providing instruction sets to instruments"

This "instrument" calls bullshit. :)

"Nobody NEEDS to buy MicroSoft products in order to do business."

...but to compete in virtually any medium-large bussiness, IT is essenti

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Guess what's the most important activity of the 21st century? Yeah, that's right, software development.

Early post + low ID - substantiation = karma

Interesting stuff is at the bottom

From the FTA
Meanwhile, author Tim O'Reilly said at CommunityOne that the days in which developer salaries differ based on the nation where the developer is located were numbered. Developers overseas now are asking why they should get paid less than others, he said. "We're actually coming to the end of cheap outsourcing," O'Reilly said.
When these numbered days are over, a great wave of levelling will start if our friend TOR is proved correct.

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Oh boy, I'll finally be a lvl 4 web developer!

tripple edged sword

As all B5 fans know, truth is a tripple edged sword. Sun has right, but to a very limited extent. Let's think about it this way [what's coming is a somewhat pessimistic speculation, take it as such]. There are ten thousand people who contribute to a huge FOSS project. Then comes a company and says, hey people, you did a great job, we'll compensate you, and they pick some of these people based on some rules and give them something for their work. What will the others think, what will happen to them ? Will they think hey, we worked and they think our work isn't worth a dime ? So what will they do, stop contributing ? If so, who'll continue the work ? Those who've been "compensated", which pack would probably become smaller and smaller, in the end landing the whole development in the hands of the "compensators".

Offer prizes for some goals, make donations for larger and/or more important projects, or to people whose work is sympathetic to you, but when you start differentiating smaller groups of people based on blurry criteria I don't think you're working towards helping FOSS as a whole.

There is a need to work closely with those in the open-source community to share revenues, said Green. - share theirs or share yours ? :))
 

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correction: "understanding is a three-edged sword"...

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the original saying is "Understanding is a double-edged sword"
1-up that, and you get triple (three-fold)

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This is exactly right, and we've even got an example already: Debian. Some of the devs were picked as having contributed 'better' in some nebulous way, and paid money. The others, who probably felt they worked just as hard, got nothing. It's human natu

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> What will the others think, what will happen to them ?

So true. It's the same sort of thing with folks who write books about open source projects. For example, I recently bought the Ruby Quiz [pragmaticprogrammer.com] book because a) it seemed like an excellent book and b) I

"Sun" said no such thing

McNealy used to say plenty of stupid shit too. Just because some high level executive expresses his personal opinion, it does not mean that he is talking for the company.

If the Open Source Market Development Manager for Sun had said something like this, then we'd have something to talk about.

Instead, people make want to make out that companies are individuals with single opinions.

How to compensate developers

One word: Hookers. Lots of'em!

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Don't sell yourself so short. Demand accomodation in a top hotel and a steady stream of cocaine and high class hookers. The response at your next interview when they ask what your previous salary was should be hilarious.

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Yes, but please deliver them with a complete reference manual and maybe a circuit diagram.

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One word: Hookers. Lots of'em!

I guess you'd be interested in this geek service [theregister.co.uk] then...

-- Steve

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Actually, forget about the developers!

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Are you sure the developers know what to do with them?

it might make things more difficult

i remember debian compensated some people to get 4.0 out quickly... this complicated things; some unpaid contributers to the debian project protested by working very slow. the compensation policy had the opposite effect of what was intended.

i also think that a large part of the reason for FLOSS to be of high(er) quality (than proprietary software) is that it is written from for fun and from passion. people dont like to produce low quality stuff for fun and from passion. nope, that kind of stuff is produced for money, e.g. compensations!

so: sun, please dont pay us, but make some anonymous donations to some projects without letting know why you did it. this will keep us healthy.

Sorta disingenious.

Companies are free to pay OSS-developers if they like. And infact, a pretty large part of the core OSS-developers are paid by some company to do what they do.

But it's pretty strange to claim that something which seems to have worked just fine for the last 15 years is "not sustainable", without providing any argument whatsoever as to what, exactly, prevents the next 5 years for working for the same reason that the last 5 has.

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I think what SUN really mean by compensate is that they are growing concerned with the amount of influence IBM now wields with several Java based OSS projects and a looking for a way to gain some more control themselves.

That's Why the GPL Works

Like it or loathe it, that's why the GPL is such a fair license. Developers, whether individuals or large corporations, are compelled to put any code contributions back into the project for the benefit of everyone else. In essence, everyone gets paid in kind by the contribution of code which dramatically increases the quality of the project over time, and the ability to use the software for free.

This means that companies who would never be able to maintain a whole OS by themselves, such as Red Hat and even companies like Novell and IBM now, can use a kernel and an operating system to do what they want on a level playing field which would have cost them billions to develop purely by themselves. Smaller contributors and those not contributing get a kernel and OS they can use for free, and do what they want with, and they make up something called the open source community.

This article should be re-titled "Sun Doesn't Understand the GPL or How Successful Open Source Projects Work". I find that a touch worrying from their perspective. It seems they've been drinking too much of the Intellectual Property anti-freeze.

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Exactly. When I read the line 'developers create free intellectual property only to have others scoop it up', I thought, why's Sun getting worried, they're using the GPL after all, not the BSD license. Even if the returns are not monetary, the GPL at least

Does that mean that...

Does that mean that they are going to honour this request from the NeoOffice people? [neooffice.org]

Meanwhile...

in which developers create free intellectual property only to have others scoop it up and generate huge amounts of revenue

The only way* for a company to make "huge amounts of revenue" from Open Source software is to add value so that people are prepared to pay you money for something that they could get elsewhere for free. That "value" might be providing top quality support, or it might be investigating in marketing or just having a number of employees who wear suits and use words like "leverage" that give corporate clients a warm fuzzy feeling. Either way, does anybody really have a problem with that?

Any company director who looses sleep about getting all this "money for nothing" simply needs to let their employees use some of their paid time to contribute to writing OSS code or coordinating OSS development.

*(excluding the "extort protection money on the back of questionable IP violation claims" method, of course).

Hire them to work on open source?!

That seems like one obvious way to compensate them.

Sun already does this. So does lots of others.

Java, OpenOffice.org, and OpenSolaris are all mainly created by Sun employees.

Actually, Linux, Firefox, Apache, SAMBA, MySQL, GCC, and the other high profile free software projects are mainly developed by people who get their salary for doing exactly that.

Long-term?

Excuse me, but hasn't the open source been around for a bit longer than "current model"?
I would say that it has already proven its sustainability.

I think I am going to cry

I think I am going to cry reading this cheesy statement that serves nothing more but Sun's PR campaign, besides of course insults to OS movement.

OS developers _are_ compensated. Not directly, but in a long-term in a much more effective way for their career

Green blowing hot air

doubts about the current open source model in which developers create free intellectual property only to have others scoop it up and generate huge amounts of revenue. Green said, 'I think in the long term that this is a worrisome scenario [and] not sustain

Cliff's Notes on licenses

1. BSD explicitly allows the wholesale appropriation of IP.
2. GPL explicitly disallows it.

Any questions?

Stealing Open Source Is Not A New Concern

Back in The Day when a lot of us were contributing to Public Domain (which was the term for a loose, undocumented, unlegalized form of Open Source back then) .. we always heard the whines, "Well, what happens if someone takes this Public Domain code and sells it?"

Well, they sell it, that's what happens. If they were clever enough to find a buyer (to pay money for what would otherwise be free), more power to them. Hell, you're so smart, YOU go sell it! Feel free!

Add services, support, a fancy front end, user customization, whatever it takes. It's free, like beer! Do what you want!

Contribute to Public Domain if you want; we all do it for our own reasons (usually to share what we've learned, and to encourage more PD code so we can learn some more). If you're concerned about someone taking advantage of that .. well, we ALL take advantage of that in our own ways.

That was then. Some great stuff came out, and still does. Public Domain, Open Source, GPL, whatever .. the thieves and cheats are going to take advantage. That's life.

One great example, of which I was most proud to be a very small part, was the Info-Zip Project (or Workgroup). Google it; that was a project :-) I'll bet there are pieces of that really great code buried even in the Microsoft "compressed file" functions added around WinXP time as I recall.

And I'm sure lots and lots of commercial archiving programs stol... errr .. incorporated parts of our code, and probably with not a hint of credit either. (Wouldn't want anyone's lawyers worried, eh?)

But we were all in the Info-Zip Project for our own reasons (mostly to share and learn); we produced a great .zip archiver (for every kind of system from Commodore C-64's to Crays (really!)); and we all learned a lot. So what if none of us made a bloody penny?

Re:all talk, no action

Come on, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and Java are all Sun projects. Give some credit where it is due.

Re:all talk, no action

Yep, it's not like Sun is the biggest contributor to Open Source in the world.