On Mon, 2006-06-12 at 14:32 -0700, jdow wrote:
> From: "Michael H. Warfield" <mhw@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> " It's a license. And you are a troll."
> That's your call to make. I am simply stating why *I* will not
> develop open source software unless somebody somewhere pays the
> full freight for my work time.
> "I get compensated for all my
> OpenSource software. I get compensated in all this other OpenSource
> software that enables me to do my job and enables all of our engineers
> to be more productive producing what we do market (and we are highly
> profitable). Just because you are clueless and think we all are just
> doing this for our ego's is not my problem, it's yours. Others are
> being compensated very very nicely and RedHat and others are very
> profitable. Looks like you have a personal problem to me. In a world
> without OpenSource software, you wouldn't have the markets that exist
> out there now, to develop for."
> Does your COMPANY get compensated for your Open Source software?
In cash? No. In kind? Yes. Very hansomly, in fact. In fact, we
wouldn't be able to produce a product profitably without the OpenSource
tools and environment we depend on. So we pay for those tools by
contributing back software we don't market. Everybody profits. Good
deal for us. Good deal for the community.
> There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. The corollary is "SAP",
> Somebody Always Pays. In your case you are willing to work for
> someone else.
I work for someone else, certainly, who pays me very well and
encourages me and supports me in contributing my non-core software
efforts back to the community. In fact, our HR department has an entire
program for encouraging "community service" types of things. This
doesn't entirely fall under THEIR community service heading but it's
certainly understood there that by doing this sort of work and
development everyone benefits, especially the company, and my talents
are put to good use.
You seem to think that payment must be in cash. I would argue that if
everything had to be cash and carry and every incidental tool had to be
reinvented internally or paid for from some other development house,
none of us would make a profit simply because the massive duplication of
effort and insane licensing and bookkeeping and resulting
incompatibilities and lack of experience and training would drive the
cost of doing business right through the roof for a lot of us. Turning
a cash profit (which seems to be your mindset, I understand this all too
well) is based upon multiple prongs. You must bring in money, yes, but
you must also keep your costs down. It is much LESS costly for us to
participate in OpenSource software and share in the benefits and share
what we can than it would be if we didn't participate and didn't enjoy
those fruits. OpenSource software contributes to our profitability. So
we contribute to OpenSource software. That's a payment in kind. In
fact, Linux, is one of the platforms on which our commercial software is
deployed. But our commercial product has nothing to do with the device
driver I maintain in the kernel and it has very little to do with Samba
even though I'm a member of the Samba team. I'm a cryptographer and I
contributed to the development of ssh in the early days (my E-Mail
address is in the original README file Tatu included in the original
ssh). Now, everyone uses ssh and our company would have an extremely
difficult time without it. Did I get paid for my work on ssh? Not
really. I was doing speech recognition research at the time. Did I
profit from my work on ssh? Oh yes. Very nice, thank you. Even though
I now use OpenSSH (as oppose to the original code) that is one vital
tool, either the original or the OpenSSH variant that developed out of
OpenBSD.
> I spent a lot of years doing that and the pressures
> twice came close to killing me, once from pneumonia and once from
> simply burning out so bad even cooking my own dinner was an intolerable
> burden.
Sigh... So now you're complaining about the very thing you were trying
to defend? Money grubbing corporate life?
> One thing I learned VERY well over the years is that corporate
> loyalty is a one way street.
Chances are pretty good you contributed to painting the sign on that
street. Been there. Done that. I've had good experiences and bad
experiences and I've been in big corporations and little start-ups. The
last little start-up I help found over 10 years ago went ape and is now
a multi-national and I've been happy ever since. I could retire at any
time at this point but my significant other would kill me because all I
would do is exactly what I do now except I wouldn't be getting paid to
do it.
> These days if I work I get paid for each
> hour worked as a consultant, a mercenary.
Yeah, I do consulting as well. You have my pity. You're obviously not
cut out for it. I do it because I have fun doing it and I get
compensated VERY well when I do a consulting gig (sometimes under the
banner of the company and sometimes on my own - I have that freedom as
well).
> It's cut-throat. It is FAR
> more honest than I've ever been dealt with before.
Sounds like you've had a hard life. One should not have to work so
hard and become so hard and bitter.
> It is simply
> impossible for ME to work on GPLed environments.
Which, again, is shear non-sense. There are several people I hang out
with at conferences whose primary business is consulting (as oppose to
me, where I just dabble in it occasionally). Several of them have
clauses in their agreements on consulting / development gigs that they
develop some custom software for the customer and they retain the right
to release it or some variant under the GPL. They're rarely developing
anything that's going to be marketed commercially but their developing
tools and software that companies need internally. So it works to
everyone's advantage to put that software under the GPL and turn it
loose. The original customer even has the advantage that advances and
fixes and improvements can accrue to them after. The consultant gets
paid and we get more software. Some of the guys behind the Bastille
project work this way as do a number of perl developers.
> The FreeBSD situation
> looks far better until I realize I am back into the GPL jungle as
> soon as I want to make a project that features a GUI.
Ah! Yup... I get it now. Yup... You're one of those... You want to
take all the freeware (note - I did not say GPL) out there and use it
without compensating the community and make your customers pay you for
it while you hide the source so they can't tell what it is you're
selling them and where YOU got it. Yup... Got it... Yeah, I know your
kind as well.
> So I develop
> in an environment somewhat less "uncertain" that allows me to develop
> commercial solutions for what I do. <Shrug> What boggles me are people
> who demand features and up to the second documentation from free Open
> Source software developers. It ain't gonna happen.
Gee... Ever try demanding "features and up to the second
documentation" from the proprietary vendors? Ain't gonna happen... Big
problem right now in DHS (yes, the Department of Homeland Security).
They've got all these departments under them who have been merged into
DHS and they all have their little proprietary communications systems
and software that won't talk to each other. And they're STUCK. The
vendors won't update the software or work with them and a bunch of them
are stuck on Windows 98 for some of that crap and they can't get the
vendors to respond. What boggles me is that they don't throw these
proprietary vendors out and DEMAND the sources to prevent this kind of
debacle from happening ever again.
> (I need to add that the decision is pretty much moot since I develop
> a lot of my software for video cards that are not supported on Linux
> and probably never will be if someone waits for Matrox to deliver it.
> And I can't see anybody doing it freebie style. Those are COMPLEX
> monsters. Look up the DigiSuite family of video cards.)
Yeah, the closed source proprietary cards are perennially a problem.
But it is getting better. Some vendors are wising up. We've even got a
few cards (HD video capture / tuner cards) that have Linux drivers and
were designed FOR Linux (and don't even have Windows drivers - my HD5500
arrived today - yea!).
I'll have to disagree with you on the other part though. I've watched
people crack apart drivers and microcode. These things can be done and
are being done. In fact, there was just an article today about OpenBSD
having better support for wireless cards than Linux because OpenBSD is
developed outside the US where people are freer about reverse
engineering (wireless cards have the additional complication of the FCC
and federal regulations). Hey... They're doing it. Yeah, the drivers
for closed proprietary boards typically lag behind. That's why I don't
buy boards that don't have drivers. That way, the companies who act
that way are less profitable. We then reward the other by buying their
products. I vote with my wallet and I can VOTE. Did I mention I was a
driver maintainer for a kernel device (retorical question - of course I
did). That is also a highly proprietary multi-port serial device (up to
256 ports at almost a megabit per port) with multiple intelligent
controllers and downloadable microcode. You're not telling me anything
that I'm not intimately familiar with and I'm standing here as a living
example of the fact that you are wrong. You "can't see anybody doing it
freebie style" and yet it only takes one counter example (myself) to
prove you wrong and we have lots of counter examples. I needed that
board working under Linux and I worked with the vendor and, together, we
eventually got the driver accepted into the kernel sources, OpenSource.
> {^_^} Joanne
Mike
--
Michael H. Warfield (AI4NB) | (770) 985-6132 | mhw@xxxxxxxxxxxx
/\/\|=mhw=|\/\/ | (678) 463-0932 | http://www.wittsend.com/mhw/
NIC whois: MHW9 | An optimist believes we live in the best of all
PGP Key: 0xDF1DD471 | possible worlds. A pessimist is sure of it!
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