Should Enterprise IT Give Back To Open Source? 312
snydeq writes "InfoWorld reports on the fight over open source 'leeches' — companies that use open source technology but don't give back to the open source community. While some view such organizations as a tragedy of the commons, others view the notion of 'freeloaders' as a relic of open source's Wild West era, when coding was a higher calling and free software a religion. To be sure, increased adoption by mainstream enterprises has played a hand in changing the terms of this debate. Yet, as the biggest consumer of open source software, enterprise IT still gives almost nothing back to the community, critics contend, calling into question the long-term effect corporate culture will have on the evolution of open source — and the long-term effect open source will have on rewiring companies toward collaboration."
Call me an idiot but... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, they should not. (Score:2, Interesting)
Open source software isn't about receiving, it is about giving.
This story shows a fundamental lack of understanding about what open source is about.
If companies, IT departments or not, should give back, then why shouldn't users at home?
Where do you draw the line?
Are people trying to say that Open Source Software shouldn't be free for commercial use?
Seems to me like someone or some people in the Open Source movement are either greedy or getting greedy. Money is not what Open Source Software is about.
Maybe the above is naive and altruistic because companies will exploit Open Source Software, but really, who cares?
In the end, if they don't give back then they're only making life more difficult for themselves because they will need to continue to maintain any private changes/patches themselves. There are significant cost savings to giving private changes back because you no longer have to maintain them yourself. Smart companies will realise this. Dumb ones won't. And so let the crumbs fall where they may... we should not care who gives back, if they give back or how or what. It's not important to us.
Speaking as an Enterprise user (Score:5, Interesting)
I work for a large company that uses Open Source Software as its backbone. I have been pushing for us to put some money into some of the projects that we use, or to recontribute some of the patches we've made. In both cases, I am met with the stubborn answer "that is our intellectual property". Trying to argue that the spirit of Open Source to recontribute to improve products, and that we've built our company upon that spirit and so we should contribute falls on deaf ears. We've now gotten big enough that the senior management and lawyers are more concerned with our IP than with supporting the community that supported us when we were starting. It's bad enough that I'm not even allowed to post code snippets/example bind or ntp configs etc on to various mailing lists I may be on because they also belong to "us".
There is a strong push at the technical level to recontribute, to fund a couple of the projects that we use heavily, but ultimately it's the higher ups and the legal folks that say no way.
I expect things like that are the reason enterprises are leeches, and I expect there is a large contingent of technical workers who disagree with the decision. I know I do.
form an organization, charge for membership (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Of course they *should*... (Score:5, Interesting)
They're also giving back by submitting bug reports and helping devs find problems in the software. They might also help others solve problems in mailing lists and forums.
Most users that give back give back in the same way. Why should we hold small companies to a higher standard?
There ought to be a law... (Score:4, Interesting)
Most companies have an overinflated view of the value of their contributions, (although they only paid their programmers industry standard wages) so they put up internal barriers that make it difficult or impossible to give back.
As long as they don't modify the source! (Score:4, Interesting)
Most open source licenses say that as long as you don't modify the source, you don't have to contribute.
As long as companies are obeying the license agreement, then why complain?
I would say that as long as they obey the terms of the license agreement (and whether or not they contribute themselves) then this is a win for open source software.
Re:But some software is more free than others (Score:3, Interesting)
That's okay, because the way the license is written, you can't force it. In fact, the license is specifically designed to prevent you from forcing users to pay. As long as there is interest in maintaining the free option, it will be there.
Users give back just by creating a community, from which you can gauge their interest. If the users mostly use it in a certain way, you know what parts to support. If the users bitch about a certain issue, you know what you need to fix. The users capable of giving back more will do so if it helps them in some way. They'll do more of it if you make it easy; I know that I've filed more bug reports with Ubuntu than anything else because they make it easy (so long as you have plenty of bandwidth, heh. Don't try to use Ubuntu websites via modem, mang. Serious fail.)
Re:Just To Be Clear... (Score:3, Interesting)
And do you contribute back as much as you get to all the FOSS projects whose software you use? I know I sure as fuck don't. Either you're being impressively hypocritical or you're Programming Jesus. Even Stallman can't make such a ridiculous claim. By your standards we're all a bunch of heartless assholes leeching off the poor, defenseless Free Software projects by daring to use them without being a major member of their development teams.
Re:Just To Be Clear... (Score:5, Interesting)
The OSI _and_ the FSF.
I'm not sure that's possible for anyone at this point.
Good riddance. I'm glad the OSI did what they did, and I'm glad because it allows the pragmatic OSS people to be disassociated with the FSF while still with them in some underlying principles. Now, I'm grateful for what the FSF has done, but they will usually stick to their ideals when it's impractical. I simply want people to use my code, and if they redistribute it, then they should give their changes back to me. That's all I want, not some dream about people using free software everywhere (although I have no problem with that either).
Re:Speaking as an Enterprise user (Score:4, Interesting)
Bug reports help in the same way, provided you do enough investigation on your side and provide useful scenarios and test cases
This needs to be written in huge letters. I've received a few bug reports that were so accurate I could jump immediately to the function containing the bug and fix it in a few seconds. Without them, I'd have probably spent the best part of a day hunting for the cause of strange glitches. In around 90% of cases, fixing the bug is much harder than finding it. Detailed bug reports, with instructions for reproducing, are incredibly valuable. Vague reports are worthless, they just waste my time. Often a bug will be dependent on some platform-specific behaviour and so I won't be able to reproduce it. I had an interesting concurrency issue like this a while ago. The bug submitter wrote a test case that always failed for him, but it passed 100% of the time on my machine due to differences in the underlying threading system. In spite of that, I could find and fix the bug because his test narrowed it down to only a few lines of code that might be the cause and looking at them carefully let me find an invalid assumption about a library routine.
I give back (Score:5, Interesting)
I give back. I support, test, evangelize, promote, install, use, help others use FOSS.
I use FOSS because it is FREE (Libre AND Gratis). Because of Linux (and other FOSS), I've helped change the minds of many people to the benefits of FOSS.
Just recently, My Father-in-law had to reset his laptop (unfortunately XP) and had to re-install Adobe CS Suite. Well Adobe said he had too many installs already, and to call in. He called in, and they said "We don't support that version any longer".
We all know to expect this behavior, but this was completely the last straw for my FIL, and he told the support person he will never use Adobe ever again.
After I put in a Linux Server for him (Document Backup), and he saw how well it worked, he asked if Linux would work on his laptop. :-D
So, we take Linux to one person at a time. We all work towards this.
And while it may not look like we are making much progress, we are. I can recall back in the early days of Linux, how much of a "joke" it was. Well, slowly and surely it is starting to make real impact into the world.
That impact is not because of corporate support for FOSS, it is because FOSS is being worked into corporate, just like when PC's started to sneak into corporate 35 years ago.
One day, corporate is going to wake up and realize that FOSS is in the workplace, because the tools they have provided are not sufficient.
Then ... you win.
Re:Just To Be Clear... (Score:4, Interesting)
Nice job completely missing the point. If there were an award for such a thing, you'd probably win it for this article.
My point is that there's no reason why people should be able to use software as much as they please, but things suddenly become magically different when it's used by a company. Or rather, used by people in the company; the company itself is but a legal construct and incapable of using software. You don't see whiny free software advocates complaining about people running giant Linux clusters without giving anything of any sort back, or about people using FOSS for profit (as long as they're not doing it for a company). It's just "oh it's a company this is completely different for no reason whatsoever".
Unless he can come up with a damn good reason for why there should be such a distinction, my point stands.
Oh, the irony.
Re:Of course they *should*... (Score:3, Interesting)
The guy who posits the idea of the Open Source business model dying is under the impression that companies pay for support so they can call someone when it's broken? ROTFLOL.
I have never gotten better support from a vendor's phone line or email cue than I do on IRC. And my fellow Slashdotters should know a thing or two about IRC's failings as a support vehicle (was it even built for that?)
Re:Of course they *should*... (Score:4, Interesting)