I don't understand open source

7 points by davetong 13 years ago | 11 comments

I had an interesting discussion with a colleague yesterday who raised some questions I couldn't answer:

1. Who funds open source projects and the main contributors to those projects? For instance, the Rails project has key contributors who seem to be working full-time on the project.

2. Can an open source project get acquired by an organisation and become a proprietary product?

daly 13 years ago |

Axiom costs several thousand dollars a year. I fund it. The main contributors are academic mathematicians since Axiom is a computer algebra system. I have tried to get funding from IBM, RedHat, the NSF, and several other funding sources. Funds would be used to run a conference, pay for speaker fees, hackathons, travel costs, and server costs. None of the funds would be for actual code. So far I have not found any funding source.

Axiom used to be proprietary. It was a commercial competitor to Mathematica and Maple, one of "the big 3". It could be proprietary again as it is licensed under BSD. Axiom contains world-class algorithms written by the people who invented them. It is truly a valuable collection of intellectual excellence. This is what motivates me to continue to support and develop it.

Tim Daly Axiom Lead Developer http://axiom-developer.org

wtracy 13 years ago |

On number two, if the project uses a BSD-style license, it's possible for some corporation to create a proprietary derivative. For projects with GPL-style licenses, the only way to do this is to get all the copyright holders (basically all the contributors) to sign a license agreement giving the corporation the right to create a proprietary derivative. (This occasionally happens with one-man projects, but basically cannot happen with large projects like the Linux kernel.)

In either case, the existing releases will still fall under the FOSS license.

eduardordm 13 years ago | |

Most large projects require the forfeit of all copyrights before you can join the project.

wtracy 13 years ago | | |

The only examples I can think of are projects run by the FSF and some corporations (the projects run by Oracle, for example). You can contribute to the Linux kernel, Apache, the BSDs, Ruby, and really most FOSS projects without signing away anything.

csixty4 13 years ago |

1. Depends on the project. Lots of small things, and even some big things, are labors of love - done in spare time for little or no reward, just a chance to put something out there and make the world a little better place. Or a chance to get your name out there.

Bigger projects like Linux and Rails are funded by companies who depend on them. In exchange, they get a degree of control over the platform their business is built upon, name recognition, and goodwill from the community.

Since you mentioned Rails, I guess 37 Signals is a great example of this. They built Rails to help build Basecamp, and they've gone on to build a thriving business from other Rails-based apps. They're also pretty much synonymous with Rails, which no doubt helps them land outside development work.

2. The basic answer is "no". "Acquiring" an open source project wouldn't negate the licensing terms of previous releases. Even if a company managed to make future versions of a project closed-source somehow, the community would be free to fork the most recent code and continue building their own version under an open source license.

eduardordm 13 years ago |

Both open source and free software can be sold.

1. Most projects are not funded at all. In most cases large companies exchange human labor for influence over the project. There are also cases where the company built something for itself and realized the publicity generated by open sourcing it would worth more than the project. And sometimes they are required to because of licensing.

2. The copyright holder can create and change one or multiple licenses anytime it wants. This is why FSF usually requires authors to transfer the rights to them.

Most people think that open sourcing is like throwing candy out of a window. But reality is you can open source you whole website's source code and MAYBE 2 or 3 persons will ever fork it. Robbers will look for money, not work.

anigbrowl 13 years ago |

1. Varies by project. Sometimes it's all-volunteer, sometimes funded by companies like IBM, Microsoft, whoever.

2. No. Well, it's not impossible, but usually open-source products are licensed in such a fashion as to prevent expropriation.

berlinbrown 13 years ago |

There are several fallacies in your argument. You assume that software cannot exist without some corporations.

Open source is almost like "free" information and content on the Internet. Any kid or adult can start a project. They can just wake up and start coding. Many tools are free and available so they decide to start coding on their own time.

Nothing should stop the coder from starting a project.

And there are some corporations like Google that allow their developers to work on open source projects. There are some companies that even want to invest developer time on open projects.

brudgers 13 years ago | |

"There are several fallacies in your argument."

There are only questions. There isn't an argument at all, let alone a fallacious one.

orbnam 13 years ago |

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