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Corporations and OSS Do Not Mix

169 点作者 MitjaBezensek超过 9 年前

20 条评论

toyg超过 9 年前
In 15 years, I&#x27;ve read my fair share of &quot;open source developer&#x27;s lament&quot;, and when the projects mentioned are stuff like Requests or SQLObject I honestly don&#x27;t understand. If you step back and try to look at these problems in a structured way, you can see that it always boil down to the following algo:<p>1. Is it a money problem? Then <i>ask for money</i> every time anyone asks for a piece of you (i.e. bug fixing, event patronage, whatever).<p>2. Is is a time problem? Then hire someone. If you can&#x27;t afford it, it&#x27;s a money problem: goto 1.<p>3. Is it a skills problem? Then hire someone. If you can&#x27;t afford it, it&#x27;s a money problem: goto 1.<p>I mean, <i>requests</i> alone is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. with all due respect to Kenneth and Ian, I find it hard to believe that it cannot pay one developer salary, even at Californian rates, unless they simply <i>cannot be bothered to ask for money</i>. Stuff like adding a &quot;donate&quot; button on the page looks <i>lazy</i>.<p>There are tons of ways to get money out of big corporations. Get a rotating-sponsorship deal where a company pays one salary for one year -- between Amazon, Google and Twitter (all heavy requests users, I&#x27;m sure), you already have three years of <i>full-time development</i>. They get quick bugfixes, you get a better life, win-win. These companies make <i>billions</i> with your code, I cannot believe they can&#x27;t cough up some spare cash. I mean, look at the OpenBSD Foundation: they asked for some change to pay a month of server time, and they got <i>Microsoft</i> to dole out huge cash to port OpenSSH to Windows. <i>Microsoft</i>, FFS!
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cortesi超过 9 年前
It&#x27;s worth thinking carefully about what you expect to gain from Open Sourcing code, before you do it. One of my projects (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitmproxy.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mitmproxy.org</a>) is pretty widely used commercially (both as a tool for analysts, and as a back-end component). We have a vibrant pool of contributors, many of whom use mitmproxy in their day jobs, but the only financial contribution from a commercial user has been from Google, and that at arm&#x27;s length via a GSOC sponsorship.<p>I would never complain about this, though - we don&#x27;t solicit financial contributions, and I didn&#x27;t start the project expecting to benefit financially. I get a lot of direct enjoyment out of working on mitmproxy, and I see it as a way to share something neat with like-minded people. In that sense, it has been immensely &quot;profitable&quot;: I&#x27;ve met and collaborated with many interesting folks because of mitmproxy.<p>If you don&#x27;t feel these indirect benefits make a project worth your while, you might want to consider doing something else with your time. There&#x27;s no likely future in which small open source projects will be deluged with either contributors or money.
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aurelian15超过 9 年前
I fully understand the authors frustration. However, as an hobbyist I would always publish my source code under a strong copyleft license such as the GPL: The companies that can&#x27;t live with these conditions are most probably exactly those you don&#x27;t want to deal with in the first place. And as the source code was created as the result of a &quot;hobby&quot;, the size of the user base doesn&#x27;t matter anyway.
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nkurz超过 9 年前
<p><pre><code> As soon as a bug affects them, they want it fixed immediately. If you don&#x27;t fix it in 24 hours (because maybe you have a real life or a family or you&#x27;re sick or any number of other very valid reasons) then the threats start: &quot;Well if you&#x27;re not going to take this seriously, we&#x27;ll have to start using another project.&quot; </code></pre> What&#x27;s the downside to an individual at a corporation for trying to guilt the maintainer into doing their bidding? If the bug gets fixed, they look good within their company. If it doesn&#x27;t, what do they lose?<p>I&#x27;d guess that companies take this approach because on net, the benefits outweigh the downsides. If guilt can get 1&#x2F;3 of your bugs fixed promptly and for free, and if the other 2&#x2F;3 of the time there are no repercussions, then guilt is probably a good strategy.<p>To change this, one either needs to reduce the success rate, or penalize the request. Judging by the prevalence of spam, you&#x27;d have to get the success rate very, very low before it would curtail &quot;bad&quot; behavior. So what&#x27;s the appropriate penalty?<p>Has anyone tried a &quot;black list&quot; license? Take some standard open source license, and add &quot;This software may not be used by anyone employed by the following corporations: [list]. If you are employed by an company on this list, and use software without specific license, you will personally be held liable for liquidated damages of $XXXXXX. If you would like have a company removed from this list, please contact [x] to discuss how we can better align our interests.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m not suggesting that this is the right solution for most (if any) projects, but consider the &quot;glee&quot; of being able to respond &quot;Great! In fact, I think you might want to switch to a different project immediately. I&#x27;ve added you to the blacklist, and while you are allowed to continue using the current version under terms of the license distributed with it, all future releases and bug fixes are now off limits.&quot;
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jaggederest超过 9 年前
I think Mike Perham does a great job of leveraging his open source project into direct contributions.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sidekiq.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sidekiq.org&#x2F;</a><p>Sometimes if you respond to &#x27;we need feature x, y, and z.&#x27; with an upsell, they actually will give you money.
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ef4超过 9 年前
Building a healthy community doesn&#x27;t just happen by accident.<p>Too many open source devs put almost no thought into the cultural aspects of building a community that is (1) not full of jerks, and (2) able to attract meaningful support from the businesses that use the code.<p>Those things can be done, if you try, especially if you start early in the life of the project.
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probablyfiction超过 9 年前
&quot;...the company wanted to invest as little time in the problem as possible so the person couldn&#x27;t fix the tests, write new ones, or write a real fix. I don&#x27;t blame the engineer, I blame their manager and their company.&quot;<p>This is spot on. Managers of software teams (and their bosses, all the way up to CTOs and CEOs) need to allow their engineers to contribute fixes to OSS with the understanding that it helps the community. There&#x27;s also the added benefit of helping the business to develop a positive image in the OSS community.<p>This obviously is not always possible, and in some organizations it is never going to be possible. However, there are teams out there that do have the freedom and flexibility to give back to the community.<p>If enough teams begin contributing bug fixes to projects they find helpful, eventually this pervasive attitude the author writes about will change.<p>On a separate note, the author needs to stand up for himself more. A boilerplate e-mail with his hourly rate wouldn&#x27;t take long to put together. If an issue is important enough to a company to bombard him with support requests, it&#x27;s likely worth it to them to pay for a fix.
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merb超过 9 年前
However you forgotten something.<p>Not all companies are big and not all have the time (even in free time) to help your project.<p>I know there are lots of companies who actually use your software and doing nothing.<p>However there are also lot&#x27;s of small companies who started or started within 1-5 years and employ 1-5 people. Those actually need your libraries most but can&#x27;t give too much back. Actually their time is lacking while they built their product. (I would like to contribute to a project but can&#x27;t due to my restricted time. Currently we are 3 people and I&#x27;m teaching one, currently I hoped that he would share more of his free time in the open source world, but I don&#x27;t believe he ever will..)<p>Also I know your library and I used it and I know that you&#x27;ve got a high quality of standard and that&#x27;s the second thing you forgotten. Younger people don&#x27;t like to take the bigger issue&#x27;s, they are just not confident. As I am in the projects I would like to fix a Bug I&#x27;m just too scary to make a bigger contribution. It&#x27;s mostly the lack of my experience. Especially when it comes to testing. Nobody ever learned that to me, so I was and I am on my own by dealing with it.<p>What I also thought and why I&#x27;m doing it is raising issue&#x27;s (hopefully not duplicating it) when a project has an issue. I&#x27;m also fixing Typo&#x27;s if I find some. I didn&#x27;t thought how much work it is for a small project. I thought I could get &#x27;something&#x27; back which is better than nothing. However I was never one of those guys who stopped responding.<p>I also tried to fix some minor things in Django however somehow I got lost and had no time on those and our project moved away from Django which wasn&#x27;t caused by Django more caused by the fact with our Python expertise.<p>Btw. I started to read HN afterwards so I was a complete &#x27;noob&#x27; at the beginning of my career. And as I&#x27;ve read through your blogs I will certainly try to offer more time at projects my company is using and I&#x27;m also willing to share my thoughts on the company if we grow. At the moment we needing to handle our stuff, not enough money, not enough developers, not enough time.
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snambi超过 9 年前
I think all FOSS projects need a support model. State the situation explicitly on the website of the project.<p>1. How many are working on?<p>2. If a patch is requested what is the SLA of that getting merged. It should be based on the bandwidth available to the maintainers.<p>3. Provide &quot;priority&quot; support. It can involve money, resources, anything actually. It is better to call out, how someone can get &quot;priority&quot; help. In case of money, provide hourly rate for different priorities.<p>4. Offer a chance to for 3rd party developers to &quot;charge&quot; a company and provide a &quot;quality&quot; fix for the project. The money may be shared between the committers and 3rd party developers, based on some pre-defined contract.<p>There are several open source projects that have &quot;paid&quot; support. So, this is not new. But it does require, thinking from the angle of money.
imron超过 9 年前
&gt; I&#x27;ve also never demanded this. It would be nice, but it never happens<p>Perhaps you should start asking then.
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unabst超过 9 年前
Author is in a far better position than most projects, since he 1) already has companies using his software and 2) has folks from those companies contacting him directly for help.<p>Corporations are in the business of making money which also puts them in the business of spending money. They pay for office space, things to put in the office, people, services, insurance, and software. They pay for everything. There are hardly any things they don&#x27;t pay for!<p>So as long as the math makes sense and the transaction is presented properly, they are happy to shake hands and pay for your services. In fact, they want to pay you to make problems go away. Red Hat is worth billions for executing this at the corporate scale. Free software is just the hook. Corporations that can pay for software now have money to spend on other services. This realization is what made Red Hat.<p>The only thing you need to know when freelancing is that if they walk away, they were never shopping to begin with. They were just gaming you. Everyone knows labor isn&#x27;t free. So if they really need your help they&#x27;ll pay. And they&#x27;ll expect market rates, so charge them market rates.
j_s超过 9 年前
Thanks Ian for all your hard work!<p>Ian&#x27;s projects are what they are today because of what he has invested in them, without any guarantee of reward. The work that he has done will remain even now that his willingness to maintain these projects &#x27;for free&#x27; has waned.<p>It is the open source developer&#x27;s responsibility to fight for their own OSS&#x2F;life balance, and it is good to see Ian taking this step to stand up for himself. Hopefully Ian&#x27;s transition away from his own self-admitted naïveté will go smoothly -- these projects will continue even when he chooses to ignore destructive input and&#x2F;or give an outright &#x27;no&#x27; (or &#x27;not right now&#x27;) when necessary. Ian and other OSS maintainers do well to take a few pages from the lean startup customer support desk handbook: creating email templates, personal developer&#x2F;contributor FAQs, etc. No doubt this blog post will serve its part as something Ian and others can point corporate developers to as a not-so-subtle hint in the future!<p>In my own very limited (and far less impressive) experience, I have found maintaining a list of alternative projects to be very helpful. Then, when someone brings an urgent need to my attention, I can point them to the list so they can solve their problem without me. One such conversation went like this:<p><pre><code> &gt; &gt; Hi ______, &gt; &gt; I will not be able to resolve these issues in what it sounds &gt; like is the timeframe you need. &gt; &gt; My recommendation would be that you install the trial version &gt; of a tool on the list of commercial alternatives: [url] &gt; &gt; One that I have very limited experience with is [url]. The page &gt; also lists all of the free tools that I am aware of. &gt; &gt; Thanks for reporting these problems; I will create issues to &gt; track the progress of resolving them. &gt; </code></pre> Edit: PS. Hopefully Ian will invest some time in sharing some of the details of his positive experiences in OSS, perhaps even in interactions with the corporate world. In addition to what not to do, examples of what has worked well could make it easier for others to request more of the same! This discussion seems to serve both sides of this coin as well.
lifeisstillgood超过 9 年前
I have mulled over two &quot;financial innovations&quot; that are worth mentioning here.<p>1. OSS Development bonds 2. OSS draw down financing<p>1. Is most practical here, being the idea that one can build a Kickstarter like infrastructure to escrow payment to develop new features on a project. This seems the closest to the OP&#x27;s problem - he wants to get paid to work on his projects. As they are really high usage projects then I suspect this is doable. What most corporations miss is a culture where this is permissible. Probably because it would effectively end their in house developer system<p>2. I want to spend the next ten years writing really good OSS software that solves and provides government services (land registry, elections etc - see <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oss4gov.org&#x2F;manifesto" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;oss4gov.org&#x2F;manifesto</a>)<p>But right now most software purchased for use by the government is license based - that is the assumption (and RFPs and timescales) screams &quot;you have already built this&quot;.<p>Seed money will help, but perhaps more helpful would be the ability to have say the first government delartment or local authority pay, and then build a finance product that gives the developer 10x to go build it. If another govt wants the software it pays a development fee, and that fee is routed to the original funder. This continues.
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skybrian超过 9 年前
Why is it surprising when companies contribute patches mostly to fix issues they care about? Isn&#x27;t scratching your own itch what you&#x27;re supposed to do?
rogeryu超过 9 年前
He can only blame himself. He should explain his situation, and ask for a reasonable amount to fix bugs or implement requests. And reasonable is not minimal wage, it&#x27;s proper payment for the work he does. If the user doesn&#x27;t like it, then they can ask someone else to fix it.
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DonaldFisk超过 9 年前
Corporations are run to benefit their shareholders, not open source developers or society at large. If they can get away with using your software for free, as per licence, contributing nothing back, and adding insult to injury by demanding any bugs they find are fixed PDQ or else, that&#x27;s what they&#x27;ll do.<p>It would be better if new commercially useful projects are released on a shared source licence, allowing free non-commercial use but requiring payment for commercial use. That way, their developers get remunerated for their work, and hobbyists still get to use the software for free.
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detaro超过 9 年前
Sadly not surprised to read this...<p>Some thoughts:<p>Some projects that have active companies behind them clearly offer development work&#x2F;support contracts that include modifications (Maybe &quot;support&quot; is easier to bill in an enterprise than external dev work?).<p>Is there potential for something similar for less cathedral-style projects? like a list with &quot;the following developers have contributed to&#x2F;a lot of experience using this project and are available for hire&quot;?
jlarocco超过 9 年前
I have zero sympathy for people in this situation, because it&#x27;s their own fault for being in it. The solution is super simple: Stop working for free like an idiot.<p>If a company won&#x27;t pay you to work on what they want, tell them you&#x27;ll get to it when you get to it. If they have a problem with that, tell them to pound sand.<p>Further, releasing a bunch of stuff as open source, and then complaining that nobody contributes back, or doesn&#x27;t contribute enough, or only contributes because they personally benefit, is a little ridiculous. Nobody forced you to give away a bunch of work for free, so don&#x27;t make it sound like you&#x27;re some kind of martyr.
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rch超过 9 年前
I like the idea of having to subscribe to get the latest source, be it dev, unstable, or whatever.
geggam超过 9 年前
If everyone who used OpenSSH donated 1 dollar to OpenSSH.... well you get the idea.