Will OSS/FS destroy the software industry? Won’t programmers starve if many programs

become OSS/FS? No; increasingly OSS/FS is commercially developed and supported. It’s

certainly possible that many OSS/FS products will eliminate their proprietary competition, but that’s the nature of competition. If OSS/FS approaches pose a significant threat to proprietary development approaches, then proprietary vendors must either find ways to compete or join the OSS/FS movement. No one mourns the loss of buggy whip manufacturers, who were driven out of business by a superior approach to transportation (cars). Heinlein noted that no one is guaranteed protection against change in Life-Line (1939): “There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or a corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit. “

Eric Raymond’s “The Magic Cauldron” describes many ways to make money with OSS/FS. One particularly interesting note is that there is evidence that 95% of all software is not developed for sale. For the vast majority of software, organizations must pay developers to create it anyway. Thus, even if OSS/FS eliminated all shrink-wrapped programs, it would only eliminate 5% of the existing software development jobs. And, since the OSS/FS programs would be less expensive, other tasks could employ developers that are currently too expensive, so widespread OSS/FS development would not harm the ability of developers to make a living. The Open Source Initiative has an article on why programmers won’t starve, and again, Bruce Perens’ “The Emerging

OSS/FS doesn’t require that software developers work for free; many OSS/FS products are developed or improved by employees (whose job is to do so) and/or by contract work (who contract to make specific improvements in OSS/FS products). If an organization must have a new capability added to an OSS/FS program, they must find someone to add it... and generally, that will mean paying a developer to develop the addition. That person may be internal to the organization, someone already involved in the program being modified, or a third party. The difference is that, in this model, the cost is paid for development of those specific changes to the software, and not for making copies of the software. Since copying bits is essentially a zero-cost operation today, this means that this model of payment more accurately reflects the actual costs (since in software almost all costs are in development, not in copying).

There are several different systems for connecting people willing to pay for a change with people who know how to make the change. A common approach is to use your own employees to make the change necessary for what you want. But there are alternatives. Bounty systems (also called sponsor systems or pledge systems) are systems where a user asks for an improvement and states a price they’re willing to pay for that improvement. Typical bounty systems allow others to join in, with the goal of accumulating enough of a bounty to entice a developer to implement the

improvement. Some bounty systems are run by individual projects; others are third-party bounty systems that work like independent auction houses, connecting users with third-party developers. Many OSS/FS projects run their own bounty systems, such as the Mozilla projects, the GNOME project, Horde Asterisk, Lime Wire, and i2p.

Bounty systems are sometimes directly supported by the project’s bug tracking tools. For example, the Mantis bug tracking system includes a sponsorship option. Using this option, every time people report a bug or feature request, they can include an amount they’re willing to pay for it. That means that any project that uses the Mantis bug tracker (including projects like Plucker) automatically includes a bounty system. I expect that more bug/improvement tracking systems will include this capability in the future, since it easily integrates into the existing project processes, and it supports direct interaction between users and developers. The widely-used “Bugzilla” bug/feature tracking system, doesn’t include a bounty system as of April 2005, but a bounty system for Bugzilla has been proposed.

Some users and governments offer a bounty from their own sites that describe what they want; Mark Shuttleworth’s bounties are good example. Software in the Public Interest funds specific OSS/FS projects. Organizations that run bounty-like programs for OSS/FS include

opensourcexperts.com’s bounty list and the list run by the Public Software Fund. There are also more general organizations that support third-party bounties or group fundraising activities, such as Ideacradle.com and dropcash.com. Somewhat confusingly, the term “security bug bounty system” is often used for the system where anyone who reports a security defect is paid a certain amount; Mozilla also has a security bug bounty programs.

Of course, the reverse can happen: Someone can propose to do something, if people will raise a certain amount of capital for it. Fundable.org supports allowing people to post funding

requirements, such as proposing to implement a new capability in an OSS/FS project for a certain amount of money. This approach has been used to support OSS/FS; Newsforge describes how Fundable.org was used to quickly raise funds so Frederico Caldeira Knabben could port his OSS/FS html editor to the Apple Macintosh’s Safari.

Another approach, primarily used when trying to transform a proprietary software into an OSS/FS program (by buying the software from its previous owner) has been called a “software ransom”; users pool their money together with the purpose of paying the owner to release the (existing)

product as OSS/FS. For example, Blender was released as OSS/FS through a software ransom (termed the “Free Blender” campaign).

Indeed, there has been a recent shift in OSS/FS away from volunteer programmers and towards paid development by experienced developers. Again, see Ganesh Prasad’s article for more information. Brian Elliott Finley’s article “Corporate Open Source Collaboration?” stated that “Now corporate America is getting involved in the development process. This seems to be a common trend amongst individuals, and now corporations, as they move into the Open Source world. That is that they start out as a user, but when their needs outstrip existing software, they migrate from being mere users to being developers. This is a good thing, but it makes for a slightly different slant on some of the dynamics of the process.” AOL decided to spin off the Mozilla project as a separate organization; not only does the separate organization employ several full-time employees, but other organizations have worked to hire Mozilla workers. Fundamentally, paying sotware developers is similar to paying for proprietary licenses, except you only have to pay for improvements (instead of paying for each copy), so many organizations appear to have found that it’s worthwhile. The Boston Consulting Group/OSDN Hacker Survey (January 31, 2002) surveyed users of SourceForge and found that 33.8% of the OSS/FS developers were writing OSS code for “work functionality” (i.e., it was something they did as part of their employment). It also provided quantitative evidence that OSS/FS developers are experienced; it found that OSS/FS developers had an average age of 30 and that they averaged 11 years of programming experience.

In 2004, Government Computer News reported in July 2004 on a presentation by Andrew Morton, who leads maintenance of the the Linux kernel in its stable form, and confirmed the trend towards paid OSS/FS developers. Morton spoke at a meeting sponsored by the Forum on Technology and Innovation, to address technology-related issues, held by Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), Sen. Ron Wyden (D- Ore.) and the Council on Competitiveness. Morton noted that “People’s stereotype [of the typical Linux developer] is of a male computer geek working in his basement writing code in his spare time, purely for the love of his craft. Such people were a significant force up until about five years ago ...” but contributions from such enthusiasts, “is waning... Instead, most Linux kernel code is now generated by corporate programmers.” Morton noted that “About 1,000 developers contribute changes to Linux on a regular basis... Of those 1,000 developers, about 100 are paid to work on Linux by their employers. And those 100 have contributed about 37,000 of the last 38,000 changes made to the operating system.” The article later notes “Even though anyone can submit changes, rarely does good code come from just anyone. Morton noted that it is rare that a significant change would be submitted from someone who is completely unknown to the core developers. And all submitted code is inspected by other members of the group, so it is unlikely some malicious function may be secretly embedded in Linux... Far from being a project with a vast numbers of contributors, about half of those 37,000 changes are made by core developer team of about 20 individuals, Morton said.”

The September 3, 2004 article Peace, love and paychecks gives one of many examples of this trend. Network Appliance (NetApp) pays significant money to one of the Linux lieutenants (Myklebust), as well as developing code for Linux, for a very simple reason: money. “What’s in it for [NetApp] is sales; it can sell into the Linux market. This is not about philanthropy. There is plenty of mutual benefit going on here,” says Peter Honeyman. The article notes that “Big

companies pick up the tab for Linux development because the system helps them sell hardware and consulting services. HP claims $2.5 billion in Linux-related revenue in 2003, while IBM claims $2 billion. Red Hat, which distributes a version of the Linux operating system, generated $125 million in revenues last fiscal year and carries a market value of $2.3 billion. Last year sales of Linux servers grew 48% to $3.3 billion, and by 2008 Linux server sales could approach $10 billion, according to market researcher IDC.” NetApp earned $152 million on sales of $1.2 billion, its

Linux payoff is significant. Linux now contains bits of code written by NetApp’s programmers, so that NetApp works particularly well with Linux. As a result, “it has won business it wouldn’t have otherwise at Oracle, Pixar, Southwest Airlines, ConocoPhillips and Weta Digital, the effects studio behind Lord of the Rings.” For fast-moving projects like the Linux kernel, the entire development process is supportive of developers of kernel improvements and drivers who contribute to the codebase... and not to those who try to rig the system and make proprietary kernel drivers (proprietary applications are fine). One person noted, “the kernel developers all like how this [development process] is working. No stable internal-kernel [application programmer interface], never going to happen, get used to it (syscalls won’t break).” Drivers outside of the official Linux kernel tree will typically become useless almost immediately; thus, developers must get their device drivers released as OSS/FS and into the main kernel immediately, or the development process will rush away from you. Proprietary components are treated as if they don’t exist, and if you don’t support the community, people generally don’t care. Organizations who try to acquire ownership of the kernel through licensing games quickly discover that their efforts are discarded. BusinessWeek ran a lengthy cover story on January 2005 called “Linux Inc.” which described the whole GNU/Linux development process, and related business models, in detail.

There are many other examples of this transition to paid-for OSS/FS development. For example, Nokia funded Matthew Allum to rapidly improve the Matchbox Window Manager (to support Nokia’s N770 Internet Tablet).

Walt Scacchi, a research scientist at the University of California at Irvine’s Institute for Software Research, studies the OSS/FS, and found that salaries are 5-15% higher for core contributors to popular OSS/FS projects. The article Firefox fortune hunters quotes Scacchi, who explained that “These people are in demand... software developers who are identified as core contributors [to popular OSS/FS projects] are likely to have market opportunities that conventional software developers would not have. If you’ve contributed to a software system used by millions of people, you’ve demonstrated something that most software developers have not done.”

The Investors.com article ”Open-Source Success Roiling Software Field” by Ken Spencer Brown (Sep. 21, 2005) discusses the continued and increasing commercialization of OSS/FS. The article reports that “For every multimillion-dollar software program being sold, there’s a good chance that at least one free alternative can do the same thing, at a fraction of the cost.” He describes the

transition this way: “In many ways, open source and its best-known product, Linux, have shed their counterculture roots and gone pro. Most of Linux’s current programmers work for companies that want a say in the software’s development.” He also notes that today, many OSS/FS products are developed by venture-capital based companies, “and venture capitalists all want their money back - - and them some.” The reason is simple: “Contrary to popular belief, most business users insist on using paid-for versions of open-source software or add-on support.” He quotes James Thomas, product marketing director at Business Objects, as saying, “Open source is a business model, and people forget that.” Brown notes that “almost every large public tech company has embraced open source to one degree or another.”

Robert Westervelt reported in SearchVB (a resource specializing in Microsoft’s Visual Basic!) reported that security, web services and Linux jobs continue to dominate the IT help wanted ads in 2004, and are projected to remain among the hottest skill and certification areas in 2005. Tony Iams, principal analyst with D.H. Brown Associates Inc., said that “Linux for a long time had been targeted for edge of network type applications, but it’s taking on support for a much broader range of applications... For a while, it looked like the future was Windows, but now there is a larger demand for a more hands-on understanding for the Unix and Linux philosophy of managing

workloads.” The Free Software Foundation (FSF)’s Jobs in Free Software page is one of many places where companies and potential employees can find each other to work on OSS/FS projects, but it certainly not the only such place.

Corporate support of OSS/FS projects is not a new phenomenon. The X window system began in 1984 as a cooperative effort between MIT and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and by 1988 a non-profit vendor consortium had been established to support it. The Apache web server began in 1995, based on previous NCSA work. In other words, both X and Apache were developed and maintained by consortias of companies from their very beginning. Other popular OSS/FS projects like MySQL, Zope, and Qt have had strong backing from a specific commercial company for years. But now there is more corporate acceptance in using OSS/FS processes to gain results, and more understanding of how to do so. And as more OSS/FS projects gain in maturity, it is more likely that some project will intersect with a given company’s needs.

It seems unlikely that so many developers would choose to support an approach that would destroy their own industry, and there are a large number of OSS/FS developers. On January 28, 2003, Sourceforge.net all by itself reported that it had 555,314 registered users on its OSS/FS development site, and many of the largest OSS/FS projects are not hosted by Sourceforge.net (including the Linux kernel, the gcc compilation system, the X-Windows GUI system, the Apache web server, the Mozilla web browser, and the OpenOffice.org document management suite). Unfortunately, there seems to be no data to determine the number of OSS/FS developers worldwide, but it is likely to be at least a million people and possibly many, many more. OSS/FS enables inexperienced developers to gain experience and credibility, while enabling organizations to find the developers they need (and will then pay to develop more software). Often organizations will find the developers they need by looking at the OSS/FS projects they depend on (or on related projects). Thus, lead developers of an OSS/FS project are more likely to be hired by organizations when those organizations need an extension or support for that project’s program. This gives both hope and incentive to inexperienced developers; if they start a new project, or visibly contribute to a project, they’re more likely to be hired to do additional work. Other developers can more easily evaluate that developer’s work (since the code is available for all to see), and the inexperienced developer gains experience by interacting with other developers. This isn’t just speculation; one of Netscape’s presenters at FOSDEM 2002 was originally a volunteer contributor to Netscape’s Mozilla project; his contributions led Netscape to offer him a job (which he accepted).

Of course, OSS/FS certainly has an impact on the software industry, but in many ways it appears quite positive, especially for customers. Since customers are the ones directly funding the specific improvements they actually want (using money and/or developer time), market forces push OSS/FS developers directly towards making the improvements users actually want. Proprietary vendors try to identify customer needs using marketing departments, but there’s little evidence that marketing departments are as effective as customers themselves at identifying customer needs. In OSS/FS development, customers demonstrate which capabilities are most important to them, directly, by determining what they’ll fund. Another contrast is that proprietary developers’ funding motivations are not always aligned with customers’ motivations. Proprietary development has strong financial incentives to prevent the use of competing products, to prevent interoperation with competing products, and to prevent access to copies (unless specifically authorized by the vendor). Thus, once a proprietary product becomes widely used, its vendor sometimes devotes increasing efforts to prevent use, interoperation, and copying, instead of improving capabilities actually desired by customers and even if those mechanisms interfere with customer needs. This trend is obvious over the decades of the software industry; dongles, undocumented and constantly changing

data protocols and data formats, copy-protected media, and software registration mechanisms which interfere with customer needs are all symptoms of this difference in motivation. Note that an OSS/FS developer loses nothing if their customer later switches to a competing product (whether OSS/FS or proprietary), so an OSS/FS developer has no incentive to insert such mechanisms. And many companies have been created to exploit OSS/FS. No doubt many will fail, just like many restaurants fail, but those who suceed should do well. The Star Tribune notes that starting a software company used to be hard work -- now people take OSS/FS products, combine them to solve specific problems, and sell them (with support) at a large profit.

Karen Shaeffer has written an interesting piece, Prospering in the Open Source Software Era, which discusses what she views to be the effects of OSS/FS. For example, OSS/FS has the disruptive effect of commoditizing what used to be proprietary property and it invites innovation