Money, money, money... and FOSS

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 31 January 2008 10:30

Opinion and Analysis

Peters said the main internal motivations for developing open source software were that the process was: interesting, involved learning something new, was creative, served to scratch an itch, enabled one to learn new skills, enabled one to show off, sometimes brought fame and involved doing the right thing.

She referred to Richard Matthew Stallman when mentioning the last motivation; RMS was the man who set out on a lone journey back in 1984 to create a totally free operating system. These days, the open source crowd doesn't have much time for him.

Peters cited the good and bad sides of companies being involved in open source - when they were involved, they wanted to influence the project in a direction they felt to be more profitable, no matter whether the developers liked it or not.

And there was also the little matter of open source people having to dress neatly, attend meetings and join email lists on which formal business language had to be used.

"when a company is involved, you basically end up writing code," she said. "You have to create things the company way, not your own way. Developers ofetn get frustrated."

As an example, she said an open source developer may go in to work on a weekend to fix a bug for a customer, simply because his employer has told him that he has to concentrate on the release of the company's product during normal hours.

And instead of being praised for doing this, his manager could end up asking him why he did not work on the product release when he came in on the weekend!

She asked developers among the audience - a group that included people from a good many countries, not just Australia - to indicate whether they would do the same work as they were doing now if there was no money involved; a majority indicated it wouldn't make a difference.

That does tend to stretch things a bit. One would prefer to instead believe the words of Dirk Hohndel, Intel's chief of technology for Linux and open source, when he said yesterday: "The main reason for going open source is to make a buck."

Peters ended her talk by exhorting the audience to help corporations do the right thing. "Show them why open source software is so successful," she said.