This is absurd. As long as the terms are made clear to you up front, none of this is your right at all. Nor are these 'rights' of yours an inherent part in purchasing a license for software.

I don't get to go to my car manufacturer and demand detailed blue prints and plans for my car just because I bought it.

It's not good customer service vs. bad customer service. If I sell you something on very clear terms that it does X, Y, and Z it's absurd for you to turn around and bitch about it not doing A, B, and C too (or even to bitch that I'm not giving you free help to make it do A, B, and C yourself).

Which is why I said I "should" over and over again. This is an ideal, not the reality and I can accept that to a point. The problem is that, more often than not, these contracts are entered into by people who don't know any better and may not know any better for years to come. When they do finally wake up, they are hamstrung to a contract they didn't understand when they signed it. This is why I said taking advantage of ignorance is wrong.

Is the car manufacturer preventing you from switching out the rims, adding neon lights, or painting your engine?

Yeah, I completely agree.
I'm just wondering how open-source people actually make their money.

We had an open-source guy in my company who was for free music for everybody. I didn't understand this. Music is a good. Musicians need to eat, too. Even though most musicians have nothing, the dream to have plenty to eat (aka place one hit) keeps them alive.
So now it's gonna be free? What about the musicians? The open-source guy didn't really have an answer. But it's "hipper" to open-source I guess.

And I'm saying 'should' is absurd. And I don't think the general expectation people have is that they're going to be able to get the source code and modify it. Nor do I consider selling software with no intention of releasing source code "taking advantage of ignorance".

There are lots of great reasons not to release source code for software. And almost all of them apply to releasing it to customers as well.

This isn't a valid argument. These would be things covered in X, Y, and Z above. Things that are clearly allowed at the time of purchasing the car. But there are lots of things that are in my A, B, and C. Things that would at best void the warranty. And of course it still doesn't cover the fact that buying a car doesn't entitle you to getting every related piece of information about the car from the manufacturer. And thinking you 'should' be entitled to that is... Absurd.

Yep yep yep.

jj, my fundamental point is that if I am your customer, and I am trusting you with my data and internal information, you should never ever ever block that information from me, especially if I have given it to you in trust. Since I have yet to see a closed-source program that adheres to this idea, I believe that taking the power away from the trusted holders, although extreme, is the only appropriate response.

Although my car example is absurd, much of the software I've been exposed to is exactly like that.

With that, we should probably agree to disagree. However, note that I am talking from the perspective of an employee of companies that can be politely called technology idiots, so the threats that you are suggesting do not exist. Knowing you deal with other technology companies that may well be able to copy and emulate, I can accept that there are situations where closing off all source code can be the preferred strategy, but these situation are so rare that I don't think closed source is the correct default strategy.

He's conflating different ideas and concepts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richar...an#Terminology

Music, by its very nature, is open-source. I am able to read, emulate, copy, cover, and learn from musicians. I can take, modify, and release it as I see fit. Copyright law is very explicit on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cover_..._copyright_law

There is nothing at all in open source philosophy that says musicians, authors, programmers, or any content creator is not allowed to earn money for their efforts. There is a huge difference between modifying and redistributing and copying and giving away. One is improving on the product and improving society at large. The other is theft.

Sure, 'your' information 'should' always be available to you. I don't see that as an open/closed issue though. Again, if this feature is important to you - make sure it has it. Furthermore, I don't think it needs to be available in every possible way you can think of - or even in a convenient way.


What??? So because people don't offer features that you like you think you should be able to change their whole business? I just don't even know what to say about this statement.


I'm not actually sure you get closed source software and why companies use it. It's not just about customers doing it themselves it's also keeping competitors from copying your work (among other things). And unless you're willing to go crazy lawyer/nda route giving customers source code is exactly the same as making it available to everyone.

Other reasons you don't let people have your source code to modify/extend it:

- Publicly facing code has higher standards than internal code. So you hurt your ability to move fast when needed. Not being able to swear or make funny jokes in my code would make me sad.
- Harder to support. When things go wrong you may not be able to reproduce the problem. Or you end up chasing down a bug that has nothing to do with what you wrote.
- Harder to write new code because you no longer control all of the clients using your internal code. You can't rely on clean service Apis to isolate your code to make developing faster.
- Much harder to maintain. People won't upgrade versions because it breaks their customizations.

What does this mean, 'technology idiot'?
Does it mean: 'Well, basically, what others can do, we can do, too?'
That's a poor business strategy in my book.

I agree with everything you say. I am not super-committed to the concept from a business perspective either way. I believe that "software freedom" should respect the right of any company to close-source, open-source, or do whatever they see fit with it, and the freedom of the customer to decide to buy open or closed.

I have issues with taking advantage of people in a way that not only hurts the customer, but hurts the seller of the software. I believe that a customer should be protected from predators.

And of course, I also learned 90% of what I know for free. If it wasn't for open source technology and open learning, I would not be who I am today.

If you take a look at the gaming scene today, the "new" model is free to play aka f2p and this model is extremely profitable depending on how it's executed.

Common sense dictates that you will have a bigger audience, when the game is free vs paid (Obviously if the game is on par with paid games).

In-game graphical things that don't alter gameplay, tend to be what people pay for in f2p games. If the audience is big in this f2p game, you can make more than if you charged for the game because audience will be bigger.

A support service for some software can relate to the above and you have to remember the majority of everyday people are morons with technology. gg

Here's an example, embedded Linux is very popular in embedded products now for I think fairly obvious reasons when compared to say a proprietary embedded OS. Another open source product FreeRTOS seems to be becoming popular. Make some contributions to those areas and it should translate to $ easily in my view.

What I'm really curious about is non commercial, open source, donation based projects that are free for end users. How much money per year do you all estimate the following developers made on average?

TrueCrypt
Wireshark
OpenSSL

Well, we know that until recently OpenSSL received a whopping ~$2k/year of donation funding http://arstechnica.com/information-t...-fund-openssl/ so that's probably not the best plan.

I work for a Microsoft shop. Most of the IP we develop for our customers we hand over (their IP) but there are certainly a bunch of open source initiatives on codeplex that our guys contribute to.

Horses for courses really. If it is a little productivity tool that is likely to help the community we'll put it out there (good for the dev community and good for our company/devs for profile/awareness/recruiting/etc). If we are building something an organisation is paying to do then they paid for the damn code.

There is probably another really interesting tangential topic (that needs its own thread) about the pros and cons of releasing internal IP. When organisation's are looking for vendors they care a lot more about a company's reputation, profile and proven results than about some cool code template that spreadsheet Sally developed. This applies to services companies rather than product companies.

catsec,

If you're a major contributor to a major open source project, there will be many different ways to make money. If you're a marginal contributor to any open source project or not involved with a major open source project and you don't have a job writing open source software, you're not going to make much money from open source. There's plenty of money in open source, but just "doing open-source" will not give you access to that stream of money.

daveT,

Your sentiment on lock-in dynamics, etc, is valid, but I think you're confusing SaaS with closed-source software. SaaS doesn't have to be closed-source software - your SaaS provider can open-source everything they use to run their service and you still won't own your data.

Jever,

Most developers are not business owners. Open-source licenses benefit developers over business owners who own the code. If you're hired to write code, you usually don't own the resulting code anyway so an open-source license benefits you by guaranteeing you future access to your own code. Businesses, on the other hand, can monetize open-source software with support contracts, consulting, premium versions, complementary products and SaaS. Don't forget that many successful open-source products would not have gotten any traction with a closed-source license - consider how some of these projects would have fared with a closed-source license in the early days: PHP, Wordpress, Drupal, Linux, MySQL, MongoDB, Xen. Rails, Hadoop. For businesses, there are many situations where an open-source license is the most profitable route and many situations where a closed-source license is the most profitable route - a generic discussion doesn't make sense. Oracle isn't open-sourcing Java out of the goodness of their hearts, nor has Microsoft suddenly turned into a do-good non-profit when they decided to open-source a large bulk of their development stack. All these software companies are open-sourcing software to make more money.

jjshabado,

I think you know all this but a general version of daveT's sentiment is increasingly widely shared among technologists and not at all different from how you feel about Oracle, etc. Because of this, in many markets, closed-source is not even an option for new products - good luck marketing new closed-source database management systems, web frameworks, or language implementations. The market for system software used directly by developers is increasingly bifurcated into open-source and SaaS - a closed-source license just doesn't make a lot of sense except for incumbents and even Microsoft seems committed to moving in this direction.

Without doing a whole lot of in depth thinking about it - I think daveT's sentiments are mostly unrelated to the examples here. The motivations of both buyers and sellers in these examples are pretty complex and based on a lot of practical things unrelated to the belief that they should have some set of inherent rights as consumers.

Just as one example, DBMS, web frameworks, languages, are all, at their core tools. The 'problems' they're solving are providing building blocks that are to be used to solve other custom problems. For this type of use case the ability of the purchaser to customize the product is an extremely high value feature - since the problems they're solving are generally quite unique. There's also value in the provider of the solution to make it open source because they get free community development effort to improve their product.

This is very different than a more end-user/consumer focused product where you're building a solution to solve a specific problem. An example off the top of my head is a security company we dealt with recently that was building software that added a type of security layer on top of your infrastructure. In that case they're solving a very specific problem and if they opened up their software it would be trivial for other people to copy and severely hurt their business.

I hear ya - I don't mean what he said verbatim - but loosely translated, daveT's outrage at "closed attitude" comes down to not trusting companies that control software projects to do the right thing and him not playing ball without companies letting go of that control. I think that's the basic reason for the success of open-source projects - customers and partners don't have to trust the motivations, or believe in the viability, of the company behind the product, at least not to the degree they need to for closed-source products. You're not at the mercy of the company if they turn hostile, incompetent or unprofitable.

I think we agree - my endorsement is qualified to a certain domain:

Tools versus end-user products is definitely another way to think about this. I'd add that long-lasting popular software usually becomes a development platform/tool in the long run.

One of the best examples I have seen is a person extending open-source for a project at a company and then releasing it to the community afterwards.

We generally contribute back everything where we've extended an existing open source project.

Aside from all of the feel good reasons, its just good business practice. Trying to maintain your own fork of an open source project can get painful and expensive fast.

This has become very interesting. Thanks, candybar, jjshabado, and the others.

Two questions, tho:
1) If you were the inventor of PokerStove, would you have open-sourced it? If yes, right from the start? If not right from the start, would you have tried to monetize it?
2) If you want to contribute to some open-source project, how do you do it? Is there some open-source forum where all the cool open-source guys hang out?

re: 1) IMHO, the name PokerStove alone has value. I don't play poker that much any more, and don't read a lot of poker-related threads any more, but maybe 3 years ago, you wrote 'stove it' and everybody knew what was meant. That alone has to be worth something.
So I can't believe the guy never made money off it. Or did he?

There's a few things to consider about 10+ years ago. The "best" book on the market was ToP, and it was the incumbent for a good decade. There was no good NL book out at the time. Hand analysis pretty much started and ended at pot odds. The math was there, but not nearly as intensive as it was once mathematicians and engineers started studying and better books came out on the market. The poker community was *really* small. Siting with a 2+2'er in a B&M was fairly unusual, and we all had a distinct style, and threads from back then would often mention that the person was playing a 2+2'er.

The community as a whole was much more "open source," if you will. The point of this and other forums was to offer valuable help to other players, and no one was really concerned about giving up edge since the winning pool was few and fish aplenty. Game-changing concepts were given away for free. Example would be ICM, 3-betting, range -vs- range, etc.

What does this have to do with Stove? The need was there, but certainly not to the level it was later on. No one would have paid for it and the few that would have paid were probably in the dozens. The people smart enough to really use it would have built their own version.

No, I wouldn't open source poker stars software. It just doesn't make sense from a business point of view.

2) I contribute to two main types of open source software. First is stuff hosted on GitHub. Contributing is easy - you just make a pull request with your changes. Second, is stuff that is run by Apache. This is ****ing painful. You create a jira for the project. You generate a patch file. You wait 2-3 weeks for someone to apply your patch file. It no longer applies cleanly. Back to the beginning...

For the big projects that we contribute to we're on pretty good terms with at least some of the people who can commit stuff. So often there's a side dialogue asking for help or feedback on something we're doing or have done. It speeds the whole process up considerably.

Pretty sure if you just followed the stuff Doyle wrote in SS (even just as a general philosophy) you would have crushed NL games at the time. Would have also crushed online poker.
[and by would have I may or may not mean did]