Is Open Source Too Pure?
My post about a putative Firefox Corporation got me thinking again about the unfortunate tension between open source and capitalism. I suspect that anyone in the know would see my proposal as a non-starter for the simple reason that the “community” would reject anything so blatantly capitalistic. Heck, people might actually get rich off this. Gross.
I’ve felt for ages that open source suffers from a split personality. Dr. Jekyll, in my view, is the brilliant ability to tap efficiently into a large community of geographically dispersed developers. He’s also the laudable desire to be a good guy with aims beyond merely maximizing shareholder value. This in turn helps to create passionate users. Mr. Hyde is the knee-jerk rejection of anything that smacks of the profit motive.
Open source should stop being so coy and simply embrace capitalism. Mozilla is, in any case, already neither fish nor fowl. The company has significant revenues and a growing employee base, not something one would normally associate with open source idealism. Why the half measures? Sure, there’d be community backlash if Firefox were to go 100% commercial (leaving the Mozilla Foundation to continue taking care of the open source community and platform), but Mozilla has weathered this kind of storm before.
I can’t see any reason why, as a company owner, I can’t get all the advantages of an open development process, a distributed community of developers and idealistic as well as self-interested goals, without giving up easy access to capital, financial employee incentives and the chance to get filthy rich. The auspices seem favorable, to the extent that more and more traditional companies are taking advantage of open source development practices. There’s a happy medium there somewhere, and it’s high time that old-school open source recognized this as well.
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I don’t think that’s the case. Of COURSE you can make money with Open Source… isn’t Marc Fleury basking in retirement even now? I don’t think any Open Source developer is against capitalism. They are, however, against making money on the back of developers who AREN’T making the money.
Comment by Cyndy Aleo-Carreira — 8/8/2007 @ 4:20 pm
Check out the idea behind IBM’s Project Zero:
http://www.projectzero.org/wiki/bin/view/Main/About
I think this is kind of what you are hinting at…
Comment by Michael Kaply — 8/8/2007 @ 4:25 pm
Cyndy - so how did JBoss address the potential issue of making money on the back of unpaid developers?
Comment by Matt — 8/8/2007 @ 4:34 pm
There are some things why open source and commerce do not fit together:
(free) developer/supporter/tester: They work hard for the os-company. The company makes a lot of money, but the people get nothing.
user: They do not like corporations, because these only look for ways to make money; mostly this annoys user, because this means ads, restrictions and spying (in most cases).
Everybody is talking about open source companies, but what is with open finance?
Comment by Heinz — 8/8/2007 @ 5:59 pm
Heinz - your point is well-taken, but as far as developers/support/QA is concerned, this is already the case for Mozilla. Anyone volunteering has to accept that the organization is making significant cash. Most people don’t seem to care. My structure would be cleaner since people would be volunteering for a pure non-profit and the organization making money would be totally separate.
As far as all corporations being evil, this is a bit over the top.
Comment by Matt — 8/9/2007 @ 9:55 am
… is AllPeers free software now or what?
Why don’t you follow your own approach and open up your sources, build up a volunteer community, while officially trying to squeeze the max of revenue out of it?
Comment by asac — 8/9/2007 @ 12:23 pm
That’s exactly what we’re doing. The product has always been free. It’s been open source since February (see developer.allpeers.com). We already have a volunteer community that has done a great job localizing the software in 15 different languages. Hopefully we’ll be able to get out more code documentation that will help to garner more code contributions as well.
Comment by Matt — 8/9/2007 @ 1:33 pm
I think Richard Stallman would be frothing at the mouth if he read this
Comment by Rod — 8/10/2007 @ 3:08 am
I beg to differ
Comment by Anonymous — 8/10/2007 @ 3:32 am
Matt, you say in a response above that Mozilla is already making money and developers don’t seem to care. I think thats because of how Mozilla are using that money - they are investing it into the development of firefox and (to a lesser extent) other Mozilla projects. They are donating to worthy open source causes. They are not paying out big bucks to shareholders or prestigious CEOs (having said that I’ve no idea what the top people are on, but considering Mitchell originally took her post for nothing I’m sure they could all be earning more elsewhere).
Open source developers want the project they are working on to succeed. They want worthy causes to benefit. But many would be put off by the organisation they are assisting getting rich by exploiting them.
Comment by Ian Thomas — 8/12/2007 @ 10:06 pm
There’s more to life than money!
Comment by Fahed — 8/16/2007 @ 8:29 am
“As far as all corporations being evil, this is a bit over the top.”
I reread Heinz post, and this is not what he has written - he wrote that “They do not like corporations, because these only look for ways to make money”. He did NOT write that corporations are “evil”. Please, if you summarize other people’s post, do so rightfully without introducing words which they never wrote.
Comment by she — 8/26/2007 @ 10:15 pm