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The perils of mixing open source and money

david.heinemeierhansson.com

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Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#11

Post by hacknat »

cjo wrote: post #10
hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

> I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support. Honest question, what about Debian? I know they had a year of FSF sponsorship back in like '94 but they seem to be heavily volunteer based with even the Project Leader keeping a day-job to pay the bills. I know they take in donations but they're generally who I point…

Fair enough, I didn't say this, but my point was more to highlight that people who take in donations are on the right side of the argument, not the wrong side. There are good open source projects that don't take "institutional" support (though who know what work is being done on company time), but they take donations. Let us praise them for doing so.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#12

Post by ssivark »

I get the feeling that many comments here, coming from developers who engage with FOSS consider the infusion of money to be a step in the right direction. Imagine like-minded people being able to contribute to a kickstarter targeting their itch, which some developer plans to scratch.

I think the picture the OP has is closer to the situation in scientific research, where you can replace kickstarter funding by grants from a funding agency. Many would claim that today's science research situation is broken, with scientists chasing grant money and low-hanging "high-impact" fruit, instead of taking risks working on the really challenging problems (large time-scales and investments) with uncertain results.

I think both perspectives have their place and it is important to have a balance between the two. In the case of research, one can argue that tenure is supposed offer security as opposed to an industry job, but it's also true that incentives are strongly tied to research productivity, and it's next to impossible to do research without research funding. If I understand the OP's perspective, he's okay with companies paying for developer time (kinda like tenure) as opposed to developers chasing grants. OP is drawing attention to the possible consequences of going overboard in this newfound enthusiasm/method for funding FOSS.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#13

Post by dnautics »

hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

While I agree with your general sentiment, there is also an observer bias inherent in your evidence that "open source is patently not better than closed source". There's a lot of closed source software that is crap, that, obviously, you won't see on github.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#15

Post by nonchalance »

cjo wrote: post #10
hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

> I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support. Honest question, what about Debian? I know they had a year of FSF sponsorship back in like '94 but they seem to be heavily volunteer based with even the Project Leader keeping a day-job to pay the bills. I know they take in donations but they're generally who I point…

Once an open source project has enough traction, there is generally little need for outside donations (as companies that use the product will hire people that focus on using and improving the product). The challenge is making that cross-over from hobbyist to professional project, and that is when money is helpful.

Debian had funding at the right time, crossed the rubicon and now has enough momentum to continue. Not all projects share the same luxury, and I view the funding as an attempt to make projects more professional

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#16

Post by dhh »

hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

I think you're forgetting that Rails was created for free, in my spare time, while I was being paid $30/hour working for 37signals and other US clients on a variety of projects.

But that's even besides the point. Companies letting their employees use company time contributing to OSS has been great. As the first sentence of the article points to, I'm talking about projects raising money directly from the community.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#17

Post by hacknat »

dhh wrote: post #16
hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

I think you're forgetting that Rails was created for free, in my spare time, while I was being paid $30/hour working for 37signals and other US clients on a variety of projects. But that's even besides the point. Companies letting their employees use company time contributing to OSS has been great. As the first sentence of the article points to, I'm talking about projects raising money directly from the community.

My point is that this is, in and of itself, fundraising.

Edit

Also, I don't want to minimize the effort it took for you to create Rails, build momentum behind it, and get other people excited about it. What if Kickstarter, et al is just a new medium to help empower other people to do what you did?

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#18

Post by hacknat »

dnautics wrote: post #13
hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

While I agree with your general sentiment, there is also an observer bias inherent in your evidence that "open source is patently not better than closed source". There's a lot of closed source software that is crap, that, obviously, you won't see on github.

My point is that open source software is better wherever we see it. Wherever we don't see it, it probably sucks.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#19

Post by adestefan »

cjo wrote: post #10
hacknat wrote: post #6

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. I consider myself a reasonable person. This quote makes me angry. This comment seems willfully obtuse in my opinion. Not noticing the immense institutional support and money behind Rails is truly silly. I don't want to come off as mean spirited, but he is very silly for saying…

> I'd actually like someone to name an open source software project that we all know and love that hasn't benefited from immense institutional support. Honest question, what about Debian? I know they had a year of FSF sponsorship back in like '94 but they seem to be heavily volunteer based with even the Project Leader keeping a day-job to pay the bills. I know they take in donations but they're generally who I point…

Debian has ample bandwidth and systems donated to them to keep their build system, mirrors, and other infrastructure up and running.

Re: The perils of mixing open source and money

#20

Post by snowwrestler »

I think it's fair to say that products like Linux, Apache httpd, Firefox, and Wordpress are the gold standard of open source software projects. One thing they all have in common is a core of contributors/managers who are professionally employed full-time on these projects.

In addition, many of these projects benefit from contributions by programmers who are employed elsewhere, but are permitted/encouraged to contribute on company time.

Basically, I would argue that open source and money have always been inextricably mixed and always will be. If you don't want to suppport a particular person or project, that is of course your right, but I don't agree that funding is some sort of alarming development.

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