Red Hat to Coax Code Contributions From Companies

Stony Stevenson writes "New Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has hit out at enterprises, bemoaning that billions of dollars are wasted each year because 95% of companies won't share code. Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, he said his company must take a larger role in urging enterprises to participate in open source projects and, in some cases, coax code contributions out of companies that have made in-house improvements. He now feels Red Hat should lead the way 'It should be part of Red Hat's job to define development in a new way, and get companies to work together' on shared projects, he said. The joint development projects would be designed to cover non-competitive parts of an industry, with individual companies still focused on their own competitive business applications."

Cable code?

My first read of the title was WHAT? Code for coaxial cable? Me no get it.

Re:

Yeah, well, I'm urging all companies to cat-5 their code, that's gotta be better then coaxing it.

It's worse than that.

I did a consulting gig a while back, whose contract specifically said I was not to include open source code in my work for them.

There was no mention of licenses; open source licenses include the MIT and BSD licenses, and many similar licenses that permit keeping the source to derivative works closed. And in fact, Microsoft itself uses a lot of BSD code in Windows, without sharing any of its source.

I was very unhappy about signing such a contract, but I needed the work.

I never really asked why they wouldn't even allow source under the MIT or BSD licenses. I expect that it was a lack of education. If that's the case, I expect their attitude is not uncommon, and sorely needs to be corrected.

For what it's worth, my current employer [amcc.com] (I'm no longer consulting) releases the source code to its Linux and BSD drivers as open source, with their source code being provided on our installation CDs.

Yes, but you're appealing against

how businesses usually think. Share their stuff with others? Give other companies an advantage that WE paid for? NEVER! So yes, it's a huge waste. But you'll have a hell of a time convincing them to change. Um, imho.

I'd sooner share their herpes

... than the code produced by most teams.

Re-use is not just about shoving code on a server and letting people copy it. You also need design, documentation, comments, testing, and ideally some level of support.
A lot of in-house code comes with none of these and as a result is worthless.

Competitive Advantage

If I'm the CEO of a big-ass Insurance Company, Bank, Airline or Widget Manufacturer and I just invested a bajillion hours of developer time into creating software that gives me an advantage over my competition, why would it be in my best interest to give my code away?

It's not a one way process

If you contribute back to a F/OSS project, such project grows and attracts new contributors, who will in turn give you stuff for free.

Win/win.

Re:

I on the other hand am CEO of company DEF and my software in this are is average. I on the other hand was able to pay 50% as much as the companies with "superior" products did. I likely also noticed that the costs to improve the software to be superior wou

Bullshit

The joint development projects would be designed to cover non-competitive parts of an industry, with individual companies still focused on their own competitive business applications.

No such thing as non-competitive parts of an industry. If two companies say, make toilet paper, and one of them has a custom program that let's say, saves energy by turning off unused lights in their buildings. That company saves money on their power bill. That is still a competitive advantage over the other company, even though it has nothing to do with the industry. Why would the company that developed that give that to a competitor, and allow that competitor to improve their bottom line? Every piece of doing business is a competitive advantage. There are no insignificant parts of any business.

Re:Lead the way

http://www.press.redhat.com/2008/03/19/source-code-for-red-hat-certificate-system-released/ [redhat.com]

Re:Lead the way

That's because it uses an Oracle backend. They're working on replacing that component, and soon Sat will be opened. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070130-8737.html [arstechnica.com]

Re:Job loss

If companies start sharing code, there will be less code that needs to be written in-house, which means some people are going to be losing their jobs. I'm sure they'll be really thankful to Red Hat.

I already moderated in this article, but I'm willing to lose the moderations just to reply to this.

Analogy: if universities start sharing research, there will be less research that needs to be done in-house.

Um, yeah. Unnecessary duplication of effort is wasteful. Yeah, they could lay off people, or you know, they could use the same number of coders and now accomplish more tasks.

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Analogy: if universities start sharing research, there will be less research that needs to be done in-house.

Your analogy is flawed, because universities do not consume the research that they produce, and they are (usually) not expected to make a profit.

Als

no Job loss

If companies start sharing code, there will be less code that needs to be written in-house, which means some people are going to be losing their jobs.

That is "fixed pie" thinking. Underneath your statement is an assumption: that there's only a fixed amount of work to be done, that the amount of work "pie" available is fixed and unchanging. That simply isn't true.

The real purpose of a job is to generate wealth. Janitors create the wealth of a cleaner environment. CEOs create the wealth of a smoothly running organization. Factory works create the wealth of manufactured goods. And so on...

If wealth gets generated more efficiently, everybody benefits, because there's more total wealth to be distributed. An organization that "eliminates" a few positions is then wealthier, which then makes it more likely to increase its product base, thereby creating more positions. While there are cyclical deviations and occasional abuses, (generally covered by existing laws) it's largely a self-regulating system.

Don't be afraid of change. Be afraid of stagnance.

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There's a big difference between a few implementations existing to meet different needs (or even the same needs) and the thousands of times that the same software is built for in-house solutions (because "our situation is unique"). There's plenty of good b

Re:

I agree. The difference that I see is code written within a corp not as a part of the OSS movement is developed with deployment in mind, not with the attitude that others are going to also use this code. This leads to poor documentation (esp in code comm

Re:

I think this generally has to do with the function of the code. For example, most corporate "in-house" solutions are pressed for time and resources. Many of them are poorly documented as it is often treated as a luxury to have good documentation. Because o

Re:Yes, but...

I think Red Hat has no right to attempt to coax or coerce companies into giving away code.

This is a straw man argument. The article said "coax." The summary said "coax." You added "coerce" which is not something anyone had brought up. In principal it is no different from saying that Redhat has no right to attempt to coax companies into giving away code or molest children.

If OSS is the future, then it will happen, with or without Jim's little tantrum.

I strongly disagree. Microsoft spends a lot of money convincing purchasers that they are better off buying all Microsoft, proprietary solutions. At the same time, not a lot of people making purchasing decisions understand the OSS business model and how it can save them a lot of money. Providing a voice that explains and advocates this method is very useful.

It is ridiculous for a CEO to attempt to paint his company as some kind of inspired model upon which other companies should remodel themselves.

He's not "painting his company" as a model. He's advocating an alternative development method that differs significantly from classic economic models. Redhat has done well by being a contributor to that model. That is not ridiculous at all.

Aside from being futile, attempting to turn the Old Establishment around does nothing but hurt the nascent organisations that will make up the New Establishment by casting doubt on their methods and making them look like they are non-viable without the support of the Old Establishment.

Old Establishment, New Establishment?!? Redhat is simply talking to companies, whether new or old, and trying to sell them on a cheaper way to do business that also helps undermine software lock-in strategies. OSS is, quite simply a feature of software, that many do not appreciate the advantage of. It needs to be explained, like most other new features consumers are not used to using.

I can see Ballamer[sic] right now, in a room full of beaureaucrats[sic] saying "See? OSS is all about getting handouts to survive." Furthermore, it is brining[sic] wolves in amongst the lambs.

In such a meeting, Ballmer is a salesman, and most companies don't trust salesmen. Microsoft already tries to paint OSS as something that is risky and unusable to big business, but not too many people are believers, given that IBM argues the opposite.

If Jim wants to make a difference, he should fund new development from emerging pools...

There is a lot of software in use today which is used in various niche applications. Quite often such software is custom built for a company, and their competitors also use custom built software. This software is not really a point of competition between these companies, just something they need in order to do business. What Mr. Whitehurst is saying is that Redhat can be more proactive in going to these companies and getting them to open source this code and allow all the companies that need that niche application to share the development costs, rather than each of them paying to develop their own version. This leads to many advantages for the companies including: lower overall development costs, more competitive bidding on development, and standardization within the industry for interoperability. Further, getting some of this code open sourced gives Redhat (and other such companies) a way to undercut proprietary software developers when providing custom coding, support, and added services.

There are plenty of companies already doing what he says, he should be happy for that and encourage those already willing rather than attempting to project an agenda onto those it does not suit.

I think you're still missing the point. This is about evangelizing OSS as a way to cut costs for companies that currently don't understand or contribute to it. There is a huge, potential market for OSS development and a lot of closed

Re:

Where's the advantage to the company that does the initial software development?

I think I already covered that, but here it goes again. Money spent is spent. You can't un-spend it an no one who went business school should fall prey to the fallacy of throwing good money after bad. In general, all companies have already invested in so

Re:Yes, but...

A comment this ignorant, and yet this highly rated, pretty much demands a rebuttal.

1. "I think Red Hat has no right to attempt to coax or coerce companies into giving away code. If OSS is the future, then it will happen, with or without Jim's little tantrum."

Guess what? There are *a lot* of companies coming to Red Hat, right now, *asking how to participate in open source projects.* So Jim is not talking pie-in-the-sky here; he's talking about capitalizing on momentum that already exists. There's pretty much zero coercion involved here.

2. "It is ridiculous for a CEO to attempt to paint his company as some kind of inspired model upon which other companies should remodel themselves."

So why is it, exactly, that Sun and Novell are trying to rebuild their business models, again? Help me out here.

3. "If Jim wants to make a difference, he should fund new development from emerging pools, like Google with the GSoC (not that I'm a Google fan, but that's another story), or IBM with their paid employee time contributions, or EnterpriseDB with their backports to the PostgreSQL team or Sun with their (somewhat clumsy) contributions to the OSS community. There are plenty of companies already doing what he says, he should be happy for that and encourage those already willing rather than attempting to project an agenda onto those it does not suit."

Considering that *every engineer at Red Hat is an open source software engineer*, either full-time or part-time, I'd say that Red Hat is funding plenty of open source development all around, thanks very much. Or maybe you don't think that any of this stuff [fedoraproject.org] counts.

4. "Having a whine that companies in the Old Establishment should be putting free money into his playpen is a naieve, futile and potentially harmful thing for Jim to be doing."

As it turns out, executives at big companies are smarter than you are. See, they understand the difference between "differentiating value" and "non-differentiating value". (Read some Bruce Perens [perens.com] if you don't get that idea.) Jim Whitehurst was the COO of a Very Large Company [delta.com] that had a larger annual IT budget than Red Hat's entire annual revenues. He saw firsthand how much money and manhours IT departments waste on software that doesn't actually add any value to the business. "Old Establishment" is looking desperately to make sure that those IT guys are building value, not wasting time on stuff that doesn't differentiate them from their competition. Understanding *and participating in* the open source model is one of the best possible ways to do exactly that. Which is why "Old Establishment" is coming to Red Hat and saying "help us".

The limiting factor is that Red Hat is not yet big enough to provide all of the services and guidance that these customers need. Jim is committing himself, publicly, to meeting that challenge. At Red Hat, we're all very proud of him for saying so.

Re:

"My point stands even if Jim had said "pretty please with a cherry on top" while wearing a pink hoola skirt."

I don't think it does when it comes to coaxing. I am not sure it does in any case.

If my approach to coaxing someone is to point out to them how the

Re:coax yes coerce no

You cannot steal what I am willing to give to you for free.

Re:coax yes coerce no

You can't rape the willing.

Re:I wouldn't say they're "wasted"

This is the broken window fallacy [wikipedia.org] in action. You might as well suggest that companies hire men to dig ditches all day and fill them back up, just so they can get a paycheck. Rewriting the same code all the time is just as pointless.

If these companies didn't need to waste (yes waste) that money on that code, they could spend that money in other ways. Maybe it wouldn't get spent on code, and there would be less of a market for programmers. But there would be a greater demand for other services, so the economy as a whole would be ahead.

Recession-proffing with FOSS

It may be news to a CEO, but programmers who write code (and their children) want to eat and have roofs over their heads, too.

That's the broken window falsehood [bastiat.org] in a nutshell, with a false dichotomy thrown in on the side.

Money and staff spent, in this case, re-inventing the wheel, is money and staff not spent on the core business activities. So,even if it's learning from o