The Wrath of Open Source
What a fascinating community the open source participants make. When such a large group of people do a great deal of work, release their products to the world, and charge nothing, it means for all manner of tricky relationships with the commercial world. The link above describes one side of the story of such a relationship between a big contributor in the open source world, and a fellow who made use of that contribution without acknowledgement.
I've been involved with open source software for a little while now, both as a big user, and as a small time contributor. The dynamics, and responsibilities changed however, when I decided to turn my little commercial software product over to the open source world. Being such an outward and influential community, it becomes rather prudent to show some respect and take care not to piss off big open source contributors.
The link to the fink page describes, from the point of view of Christoph Pfisterer (the fink project leader) a little disagreement he had with the owner of OpenOSX, Jeshua Lacock. OpenOSX sells, amoung other things, CDs of pre-compiled Unix applications for Mac OS X. The porting of those applications from their various Unix bases to Mac OS X has mostly been done by the fink team. Jeshua has taken those ports, copied them to CDs and made an installer which copies the results to the user's hard drive. A reasonable service perhaps, for those who do not want to deal with fink directly, and Christoph is happy enough that that is happening. In fact, it is not an uncommon occurrence for a company to sell packages of open source material - such a business model is quite acceptable under most open source licenses.
So what does the original open source contributor get in return? In many cases, and in Christoph's case in particular, the reward sought is acknowledgement of who performed the development work. Christoph claimed that Jeshua used the work of the fink project without confirmation. If you care to read their email conversation, you'll find that Jeshua indeed is rather ignorant of and even obnoxious towards the fink team and their work.
That pisses Christoph off. And the reaction across blogs and within open source circles in general has been the slandering of the OpenOSX company. Bad move on Jeshua's part methinks.
In fact, it makes me wonder what continues to motivate teams like fink. Companies are making good money doing far less than what fink do, but by utilising somewhat more universal marketing. Fink have a brilliant and very simple (once-you-get-used-to-it (TM) ) method for porting and installing a massive amount of incredibly useful software. I've used it on many, many occasions and it has been hugely significant in my productivity on OS X. OpenOSX put the results on CD and sell them for $30-$60 a pop. So if Joe Bloggs wants to install the u-beaut Foobar UNIX app on their OS X system, they can either type "fink install Foobar" at the Terminal prompt, or buy Jeshua's CD and double click the installer.
Such reasonable simple GUI wrappers, which hide details or complexity from the user, should not actually be discounted as trivial. They do serve a great purpose because there are a huge number of computer users who simply do not want to get their hands dirty when using their computer. They want to double-click icons and see buttons and progress bars. Predictable things to push and prod. And many open source developers are very thankful that such wrappers put their hard work in the hands of so many computer users. Targeting such users is often not the goal of an OS developer, but every developer likes people using their handiwork.
But when people are making money off your work, and not providing acknowledgement, someone is going to feel cheated. That's where open source gets tricky. There are those that code because they like it, and honestly are not interested in financial reward. Then there are the rest of us who like a little bit of attention in some manner, when we create a product out of time and effort.
Software is such an odd product. Creating the first one takes time and effort. After that, copies are free. But how do you monetise the initial effort? Many open source developers don't seek to - the software is entirely free as in beer, as well as free as in speech. But of course, there are plenty of companies making money off open source software. Companies like RedHat, Mandrake and Slack do not make money selling software, because their software products are free. Instead, they make money by selling CDs with the software on them, and boxes with the CDs inside them. They also make money by supporting the software and by selling solutions which use the software. Such companies, with their rather untraditional business models, are generally the "good guys" in the open source world. They make their money because open source software exists, but they do not directly sell the work of others. Luckily, Apple is included in this group - despite being a traditionally closed, proprietary company, they sell a product based on open source code. But they acknowledge, and this is significant, contribute code back to the open source community.
Making money off open source software is tricky business, and many companies just do not get it - it is a fundamentally different concept to the tranditional way of running a business. Nonetheless, there are plenty of companies that do. The business people may have some enterprising skills that the original coders lack - some coders may even feel envious or like they missed an opportunity - but they still need to understand open source. Not the code, the community. The community and their rants may be limited in distribution and even effect now, but their impact will only grow, and if you want a successful business, I don't think now is the time to piss anyone off that contributes to the open source community.