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On the Shoulders of Open Source
Thursday, August 20, 2009 — posted by David J. Kelly
Every time I mention that we are exploring a new open source application to help support our customers, our Business Development VP, Matt Arnold, asks the very reasonable question, “How do these guys make a living?” I usually mumble something about “support services, extensions, customizations.” This is probably just to make me feel like they are making a living. I do this with the knowledge that a goodly part of my own living is dependent on many people whose hard work I don't feel like I do enough to acknowledge or support.Recently my wife and I entertained a friend and his new lady-friend. She mentioned that her 27-year-old son wrote software for an open source rendering engine for game developers. Without thinking nearly hard enough about the social graces, I popped out with Matt's standard question: “How does he make a living?” To which she replied, fortunately with a laugh, “He doesn't.”
I suddenly had visions of a pale young man living in a basement, his resume a mile long with hard, complex work, and no one to help him pay his bills but a sympathetic mother. I was imagining, of course, but you get the point.
The difficulties I have in supporting open source applications are complicated. For one thing, I and my coworkers are busy people who focus on supporting our own customers and their demanding schedules. To be blunt, there is seldom time.
Sometimes we make improvements to open source tools, but these are in response to customer needs. Our customers own the fruits of our labors. We might conceivably build clauses into our contractual agreements that allow us to migrate improvements back into the open source community – but having spent a brief period as an expediter of commercial contracts in an engineering corporation, I can assure you that it isn't going to happen. Legal departments around the globe are twitching and flinching in their beds, wide-eyed and sweating obscure Latin legal terms at the thought. (This is not to say that it doesn't happen occasionally – but I would say it is not common.)
We do provide a certain amount of help to the open source community through implicit testing, bug discovery, and clarification in the form of forum questions. But I can recall more than one problem we have had with an open source tool that could have been addressed with a small donation earmarked for a certain fix. This would have benefited the entire community as well as our customers, and it probably would have been done more efficiently. As it happened, because we had a specific commercial contract, we developed the solutions ourselves. And it is difficult for us to justify spending our own money on a software issue that is really our customer's.
General donations are probably needed and deserved – but then one starts to wonder about the reasons open source applications are open source. Isn't it good for things to be free, because that means people are doing things for all the right reasons, so we get good software made by people who want to make something good? And isn't part of the theory that in an open source community, multitudes of people contribute small, affordable chunks of time so funding isn't needed? (And this happens how often? Most of the open source applications I know seem to depend on one or a few dedicated people who are making a living by – other means. I don't ask.)
We can also ask the question, where exactly do donations go? Would I be able to see itemized account books for an open source application if I asked for it?
One situation we have found is that when we do work for the academic community, they are eager and happy for our work on open source tools to be fed back to the source. This makes sense for them, of course, because they are in the business of fostering improvements in the intellectual community. And if I have learned anything about the academic world, it is that they appreciate free tools.
I don't know if there are any firm conclusions to be drawn out of all this, and I'm sure the topic could be explored in much more detail. It does seem to me that commercial businesses need to explore some kind of model for supporting open source tools, similar to the academic community. As a consulting company between large customers and small development resources, it is sometimes an awkward balancing act. It is a complicated problem, but it is also clear that many people benefit from the hard work of a community who are chronically underappreciated and often, as I have discovered, personally underfunded.
If you have thoughts or examples about business support for the open source community, I would like to hear them.
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