[Dclug] The Economist says recession is a boon for FOSS

[Joseph S D Yao]

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 05:28:32AM -0400, James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:
> No, geeks win in several ways. But few people get paid to write 
> software. They get paid to deploy and service it. And the rest of the 
> geeks get better (or at least more fun) software to work with.
> 
> With the large cooperative community, the software essentially write 
> itself, because many people do it as a hobby on their own time, or even 
> in some cases on their employer's time.


Software never gets written by itself.  It always takes time and energy
from someone or some entity.  And it takes even more to properly
engineer software so that it fails less often than otherwise.  That is
why practically nobody in the commercial world does software
engineering, to the world's detriment.

One of the advantages of FOSS is that it divides the effort and test
cases over a number of people proportionate to those interested in the
software.  This can be a good thing.


On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 11:46:01AM -0400, ethan at 757.org wrote:
...
> I understand the point of view, but it's kind of puzzling. Right now, lots 
> of people get paid to write software. If there is an expectation (for the 
> corporations) that people should write it for them for free, then that 
> hurts the software authors.
...


First off - if there is a piece of FOSS that a corporation can use for
free, then anyone who hires and pays programmers to write the same code
is wasting the corporation's resources and should be terminated.

Second off - if there is a piece of software that a corporation wants
written to its own specifications, then it will have to pay people to do
it.  People who are writing FOSS software are doing it to the
specifications on which they have decided, or to the specifications for
which others are paying them.

Third - I hope I didn't blow your mind there with the thought that
people could get paid for writing "free" software.  You seem to be stuck
in the "free beer" model of "free".  Software that is "free" in the GNU
sense is software whose source may be freely read and modified.  Almost
all code written for the US Government has always been in the public
domain, for instance.

For the GNU philosophy on free software, please read
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>.


> Yea, but by the same token I'd argue that only a subset of the open source 
> stuff is highly successful and maintained over time. Lots of it falls when 
> the interest from the author(s) falls.


As others have pointed out, (a) this is a property of all software, not
just FOSS, and it's even more painful when one has paid a company for
that software or for the right to use it under limited circumstances;
(b) if nobody's interested in it, then it should fail; (c) if it is
FOSS, then someone else may pick it up on his or her own, or the ones
desiring it may pay FOSS programmers or [better] software engineers to
maintain it, and even specify the direction in which they should develop
it!


...
> matter. How many people using open source software has actually modified 
> the code, do you think?
...


This has long been an open question, and there is no way to resolve it.
But it's probably more than anyone has ever reported.  Of the billions
of people on this planet, it's probably a small fraction - say, only
hundreds of thousands, or millions?


-- 
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** Joe Yao				jsdy at tux.org - Joseph S. D. Yao
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