[100683] in RedHat Linux List
Re: The future of the OSS model: self-destruct?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Michael Jinks)
Sun Nov 22 22:06:23 1998
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 1998 01:00:43 +0000
From: Michael Jinks <michael@twopoint.com>
To: lance@tky3.3web.ne.jp
CC: redhat-list@redhat.com
Resent-From: redhat-list@redhat.com
Reply-To: redhat-list@redhat.com
Lance Cummings wrote:
> My real question is how can I (or anyone) make any money from this software
> model?
By making money on something other than the software itself.
> Sure Red Hat and some others are selling the freebie, but they are
> essentially becoming service companies, not software companies. Frankly,
> the IT service business is lucrative, but personally I'm tired of it.
"IT service" doesn't necessarily have to mean answering the phone and
making emergency downtime housecalls. While it looks like the days of
write, wrap and sell, one-size-fits-nobody software are drawing to a
close (free software or no), the world of the retail software bundle is
not disappearing without leaving a replacement.
> And how extensible is this model to other software development?
An unanswered question so far. I'm following the Golgotha project with
interest, as much for the hope of a cool game as for the in-vitro study
of the project.
> The model
> depends on the egalitarian contributions of programmers. This work is done
> in their spare time. Their real jobs as commercial programmers allow them
> to make a living developing software under the old business model.
Not exactly. In fact, I would bet that many programmers who work for
packaged software manufacturers are under some sort of agreement NOT to
do this, or to do it in such a way that they don't compete with their
employers. A lot of the people who work on OSS aren't employed as
programmers, at least not in the sense that this post suggests.
Leaving aside the modern phenomenon of programmers being paid to
contribute to free projects (RHAD etc.), there are a lot of people whose
work on free software consists of solving problems that their employers
need solved; and the employers are aware than as long as their
employees' efforts are GPL'ed, they will pay off much better than if
they weren't. Off the top of my head, I can think of several companies
which do this: NASA, IBM (with Apache), Cisco, Fermilab, and those are
just the ones that I know of. Even Sun does this to some extent.
> So if
> more and more software becomes OSS, doesn't that dry up the good paying
> programming jobs that really are what allows the off-hours work on OSS.
Probably not. For one perspective on this, see
http://future.sri.com/bip/am.html (linked from www.opensource.org).
This is a long article, but well worth reading for anyone who is
interested in the future of the software industry. One of the
predictions that they make is that as software availability grows, and
as small companies become more central to the way that the world does
business, software needs will also tend to fragment, to the point that
custom software solutions will be both available and more necessary.
Software won't be bundled in one large version and sold to everyone, it
will be sold in the form of little tools that do one thing well, and
tend to have much smaller audiences than, say, MS-Office. Those
companies which do still sell software will make less money per release,
but will also have fewer employees and lower overheads (a la RedHat).
> And let's face it. A lot of the OSS motivation is to bring down the church.
That's a big deal now, but I submit that the bring-down-the-church
mentality comes more from the user/supporter section of the OS community
rather then from developers. Developers have historically been problem
solvers first and activists second. Let's also not forget why the curch
needs to come down: it doesn't do its job very well. This is an opinion
found outside the OSS community as well (for example, see the cover
story on this month's Wired: "83 Reasons Why Bill Gates's Reign Is Over"
-- Linux is only #14).
When one is writing software (as when one is fighting a war), tangible,
close-at-hand goals will tend to have much greater resonance than
abstract, esoteric ideas like "Down With M$". When I'm tweaking my
routing rules, I don't think about how I'm saving money by not buying an
NT-based firewall; I think about making the device work for my purposes,
here and now. This, IMHO, has been a much more important force behind
OSS development historically, and continues to be such now that there is
some public noise being made about OSS vs. Microsoft & Co.
To some extent, the current software market is artificially bloated and
overvalued. The days of getting quickly wealthy by writing software
were gone with the rise of Microsoft and they won't be coming back. But
the days of solving problems for people who need to get things done
(what software should have been about all along) will be with us
forever.
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