Wake up, Linux hippies: No one 'morally obligated' to give back For years, open-source advocates – including me – have demanded greater open-source contributions from the world's largest beneficiaries, from Google to Morgan Stanley and the US Department of Defense. Now Amazon is on the firing line for not giving back commensurate with the benefits it receives from various open-source …
Good post, and when you and Glyn Moody agree about something it's worth noticing. Bt I have some difficulty with the suggestion that contributions by users of Free Software should be "commensurate with the benefits it receives." That. to my mind, is a tactic to peg Free Software to the money economy, which is unnecessary and too controlling, and quite probably the fact that the value of Free Software is expressed differently to /only/ economic value is the reason for Free Software's rise and rise.
As a matter of interest, some years ago, when responsible for the implementation of a particular piece of GPLed software, as a contribution, we shelled out quite a few thousands on getting the software prepared for multi-lingual operation and for translation work. The company which produced the software promptly pulled the work we paid for into a new paid-for version, meaning our contribution supported, oh, one company, and made me forever aware of the iniquity of "open core" and other weaslly marketing gambits.
"Bt I have some difficulty with the suggestion that contributions by users of Free Software should be "commensurate with the benefits it receives.""
You claim this is pegging it to a money economy, but to me it sounds like "to each according to his ability, from each according to his need."
The thing about free open source is that it's ideologically neutral. It *isn't* socialist, nor "objectivist", nor capitalist. It's just a thing that is, though if I were to to say it was close to any ideology it would be libertarian. Somewhat. Maybe. It's a tool, like a gun or a hoe or electricity, that can be used by anyone regardless of their beliefs.
The point is, you're projecting your ideology onto it, and that ideology is suspicious of the "money economy", so you would naturally see the above statement about contributions as confirming that suspicion. You *could* see the opposite, that it supports a socialist stance. Either way it's irrelevant, as it's your ideology projecting itself onto something that isn't inherently part of any ideology.
Were moral issues clear cut there would be no disagreement, but it is clear they are not, with more than one viewpoint being defendable. So some see the morality of at least trying to balance what they receive with what they give. Others see it perfectly moral to take but not give and consider the others suckers. I guess the world will go on with the mix of attitudes we have.
I work for a very large multinational, and at some sites (like mine) we very willingly feed back fixes, and support for new hardware, into the open source, whereas at others nothing is allowed back out to the community.
When we raise the OSS issue within the company technical hierarchy, we are just told that if the lawyers ever think that we have to release code from all sites, then we might have to think about it!
One particular site in Edinburgh is very quickly onto the forums to report problems, very quick to grab community supplied fixes, but will not even allow their code to be viewed from sister sites!
Personally I think that such abuses of the system are just wrong!
I worked at Amazon back in 2004 and back then they certainly made huge use of FOSS - and to my knowledge it was out-of-the-box. There may have been some modifications but nothing so obvious to me. All the Amazon smarts were in huge big closed source projects developed in house. Even kernel fixes were done totally in co-operation with Redhat's support team. I for one think that there is a moral obligation for users to contribute back in one way or another to the FOSS scene - but why should that come in the form of software patches?? Amazon has done a lot to benefit FOSS just by not paying MS and co loads of support monies and have been relatively platform agnostic with their offerings over the years,
While most of your article has merit, the title undermines the very ethos of Open Source i.e. community. While perhaps no single individual should be morally obliged to "give back", society as a whole has a rather large interest in keeping Open Source thriving.
Large portions of the internet and many a government infrastructure (including their legislatures and judiciaries) run on Open Source. Public code is the only proven way to ensure that the systems which play an ever-growing role in governing our lives remain open to inspection. The title of your article is a pathetic fop to private interests and a narrow interpretation of Mr. Torvald's comments.
So Mr. Asay, rather than suggesting that you vote for the left, I simply suggest that you put a little more thought into your news-making headlines.
... and if the corporation that's "giving back" has customers and/or shareholders, that's who will foot the bill.
Leaving aside the loner hobbyist who hacks out code (but hardly ever documentation) in their own time and for their own reasons. They're different from industry-quality OSS contributions. However for corporately sponsored OSS there is a measurable cost: the developer costs money, the support costs money, the legal defence costs money, even the publicity and promotion costs money.
Now, I appreciate that it's customary to regard large faceless organisations, financial institutions and governments, as "them" - as if they exist in a parallel universe and receive and disburse money in a way that's completely unrelated to us and our "real-lives". However, their revenues come from somewhere and for every £ they spend, they've got to earn (at least) another £ from customers or taxpayers or investors.
"Open source selflessness does not exist" vs "I think it's really refreshing to see people working on Linux because they believe they can make the world a better place".
Open source selflessness clearly does exist, but as you suggest, it is unlikely that this is the main driving force behind FOSS.
Shut up. The rest of us don't give a damn. "Open Source" was here long before Stallman, the FSF, the GPL, and you lot. And it'll still be here when you're all gone. We're not interested in your moral agenda. We write *real* open-source code (you remember: the licence which doesn't use 600 words to re-define "free"), and we use it, and we're sick of your whining. Go away.
If you have an overwhelming research interest in something, curiousity is probably the driving factor initially. Then there is the sense of benefit of acquiring knowledge. Then, if like me you teach or for others who engage in funded research, that knowledge becomes a salary. But it's very easy for others to ascribe selfless motivation to what is self interested here. You don't sell knowledge by sitting on it but by sharing it and that goes for source code. You don't really understand why you do these things at the start of an academic career. Linus's work was initially done while studying for an academic degree and I'm convinced this contributed greatly to his success in getting a degree in 1997 and he wouldn't have received his honorary doctorate 2 years later otherwise.
Similar work was done on Minix, Linus' initial development platform, in academia and for academic purposes. Linux wasn't developed on raw hardware. It couldn't have been developed on MSDOS. It was developed using Minix.
When I give code away, I just give it away. That, in itself, is the subversion I am hoping to achieve. I would be very surprised if most users were able to contribute: if they had the skills & tools they would not need my code. I do, but the OSS act is the giving away, not an expectation of a quid pro quo.
So what if someone builds it into a corner of a multi-million pound empire on it? I bet they had to do many thousands of much harder things to do that, the amount of effort I put into my code will be insignificant in that context.
or it wouldn't be a gift? Somebody might choose to give something back or they might not, but there is no debt to repay even morally, and thinking that there is devalues the original gesture. As the article explained there are hard-headed commercial, personal and even political reasons for giving stuff away. Often there are hard-headed commercial, personal or political reasons for giving something back. But not always.
It can't work both ways. Either FOSS is a "gift" in which case it is obligation free, or it is not a gift - in which case the obligations are spelt out quite comprehensively in the license. Compliance with the license means obligations are met.
I think the previous poster understands "gift" far better than you do - although mutual gift giving is the socially accepted norm at Christmas it is expected that one does not give a gift solely on the expectation of receiving a gift in return, which is the point being made.
No one has ever made an amoral decision. People and organizations definitely have a moral obligation to give back. If not in reciprocal work, by giving money to the FSF, OSI This guy is a moral dwarf, overwhelmed by greed and the craze for self aggrandizement that is engulfing our society. And by ENVY. He's sick with it. Work together. Produce for the common good of all. You don't do that, you're a moral leper. That's an invariant. True for all time.
On the other hand, one shouldn't criticise the behaviour of others too much. Mankind needs help, from every creature born. But the moral obligation to give back remains.
...or to give away...
...but if you try to pass off my work as your own, I'll happily roast your nuts over an open fire.
THAT'S what GPL is all about.
FWIW $orkplace has contributed hard cash to a number of projects - but only because it's directly suited our interests to do so.
> Perhaps. I've made similar arguments in the past.
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I'm right (Ashleigh Brilliant). You're inviting a cheap shot (hereby delivered).
> The moment it's perceived self-interest is furthered by contributing rather than
> free-riding, Amazon will contribute. And not until then.
The managers at Amazon know as much about the future as you, I, and your average astrologer. They make decisions based on company culture, prejudices, hunches, and untroubled by any technical knowledge. So Amazon doesn't contribute; Google does; pretty much any HW manufacturer does... Some companies do, some don't. Success and failure can be found on both sides of the fence (which isn't even a fence, but rather a broad continuum).
I don't know _WHY_ FOSS is successful. In an economic system explicitly based on selfishness and competition, it shouldn't. And yet, since I entered IT more than 20 years ago, when it was a ridiculed idea espoused by a bunch of hippies, it has developed into a billion-dollar industry. The likes of IBM, SGI, Intel, Sun (OK, they went bust, but so did many others) keep investing money into it. Red Hat and Google have built empires on it. All of them following the capitalist maxim of increasing shareholder value and crushing the competition. I don't know why, but enough of those hard-nosed capitalists see an advantage in being part of it. Not to mention the army of volunteers who contribute for a bit of short-term professional recognition.
Pragmatism.
If something ISN'T a part of my core business, but I still have to do it, it's useful for me to amortize those costs across many other companies who also have to spend them. Even if the other companies that I am working with are my competitors, I gain from them working with me as much as they gain from me working with them. we can both lower our costs, everybody wins.
Attacking the people without whom open source wouldn't exist, and claiming that their moral leadership is "their opinion" and therefore not valid, is hilarious. This is especially ironic for those who try to make a buck out of open source. Thick, this irony, and not very tasty.
"The world would be a _much_ worse place if we didn't have companies doing things for money [ profit ]." - LT
Fail.
For someone like LT to come out with such nonsense shows that he may be a good programmer but he can't think very logically. The proof of the pudding is here:
http://www.realityinfo.org
Just follow the arrows.
Logically the profit motive is anti human. Anti transparency. Anti speedy development. Anti life. ( at this state of Capitalism )
Heck..and to think this guy gave us Linux...
As someone who uses Perl with the HTML::Mason framework, I think you could reconsider your slating of Amazon. They provided the Mason project with a great deal of feedback and improvements - both to performance and more importantly stability.
One of the biggest benefits a large user can have is to improve stability in a product. They tend to stretch the product to its limits and beyond. Perhaps this is where the open source community should give credit and encouragement.
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