On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, David Rusling wrote: > Now for a bit of a rant. Personally, I have a deep and abiding > respect for open source (for me, it's the key social invention of the > internet age), however I also recognise that it would not exist > without companies using open source as part of their products. Let's > face it, an awful lot of open source engineers are getting their > mortgages paid by companies that make use of open source. I cannot be in full agreement with the above statement. I think the reality is way more nuanced than that. The truth of the matter is that Open Source came into existence without and despite involvement from the corporate world. And the very reason it started to attract interest from the corporate world is because of Open Source's superior quality and performance at a lower cost. Open Source would have existed even without companies using it as you would still have those Open Source activists using it themselves in your product, even without the help of the corporate money. The company involvement in Open Source did indeed accelerate its development by paying many people to work on it full time. But Open Source would still be there and still be in good shape even if corporate involvement didn't happen, just like it was before. And this superior quality and performance characteristics of Open Source are not a coincidence. They are the first motives in a world which is not driven by monetary profits, unlike most if not all the proprietary alternatives. The people leading Open Source are driven by the technical excellence of their work and the recognition they get from their peers. Money is a far secondary motive, and in this age you can choose between different sources of sufficient money not to have to worry about it anymore and compromise too much on your primary motives when you already have a track record in this Open Source world. So to say that the corporate world might need to consider Open Source to be competitive and survive, but the reverse is not true i.e. Open Source doesn't _require_ the corporate world to survive. > No company invests in open source for philanthropic reasons; they > understand that it is necessary for their businesses. The tricky > problem is always in how ethical a company's usage is (and I use the > word 'ethical' deliberately because this is wider than mere legal > words smithing); whenever I give talks on GPL, I emphasise both the > moral as well as the legal duties. In my experience, most companies > struggle to understand open source when they first start to interact > with it. It usually takes some open source zealots within the company > to persuade their management of the right way to behave. The best way > to get companies to change their behaviour is to find them and support > them. Making threatening GPL noises in email does not help them in > any way. Here I'm more in agreement with you. However this is again not the full picture. Ethical or not, the first motive of a company is to make profits. If that was easy to get away with it, all that companies would do is simply to grab this body of source code for themselves and never contribute back. And a sizable number of companies, even some sizable companies, are doing just that. While this isn't going to kill Open Source, this certainly makes it weaker because this is contrary to that very first principle that made Open Source a success in the first place. Companies doing that are after the immediate monetary profit and not the technical excellence and performances. But even when leaving the ethical aspect aside, it is not going to be profitable for companies in the long term to grab Open Source results and move it back to the legacy proprietary model. Doing that will be to their disadvantage when some other companies come along to compete on the market using Open Source to its fullest technical excellence and performance potential. Fortunately, a sizable number of companies, even sizable ones, did understand that already. But... while some companies are struggling to understand how to interact with Open Source, the Open Source world still dash ahead without much concerns for corporate profits. As said above, those strange Open Source animals are motivated by the technical excellence of their work, and they're going to fight on that front against anything that might affect or prevent that goal. This is again why Open Source has always progressed even despite initial attempts to kill it from some corporations. So far, Linux has always been immune to monetary forces, whether those forces were against it or not. So it is fair to say that Open Source survival depends primarily on its technical advantages above anything else. In conclusion: don't get surprised if technically inferior propositions, such as proprietary 3D libraries coupled with kernel-side interfaces, are met with strong or even vehement opposition. Some people will be sufficiently moderated to tell you that if you want to do such thing then you get to deal with it all yourself and that they are not interested in any accommodation that would help you. But it is clear that you will never get a consensus for supporting such technically inferior solution in the mainline tree, as from an Open Source point of view such a move simply makes no sense. Accepting such things in mainline would weaken the very principle that as made Open source in general and Linux in particular such a success, while refusing it isn't going to affect the survival of Open Source anyway. The compromise here would be only in the corporate world's favor. And as the past history has shown in such cases, the Open Source way always ends up prevailing eventually, despite the lack of corporate assistance. So, while I'm not overly optimistic about this issue, I wish those companies lobbying for the weakening of the Open Source principle could rethink and truly evaluate the economics and actual value their proposition has on their long term profits, given the fact that the Open Source community with lower monetary ambitions is highly unlikely to back down on that principle. In the end, free has its price too. Nicolas _______________________________________________ dri-devel mailing list dri-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/dri-devel
