

I don't understand open source - davetong

I had an interesting discussion with a colleague yesterday who raised some questions I couldn't answer:<p>1. Who funds open source projects and the main contributors to those projects? For instance, the Rails project has key contributors who seem to be working full-time on the project.<p>2. Can an open source project get acquired by an organisation and become a proprietary product?
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daly
Axiom costs several thousand dollars a year. I fund it. The main contributors
are academic mathematicians since Axiom is a computer algebra system. I have
tried to get funding from IBM, RedHat, the NSF, and several other funding
sources. Funds would be used to run a conference, pay for speaker fees,
hackathons, travel costs, and server costs. None of the funds would be for
actual code. So far I have not found any funding source.

Axiom used to be proprietary. It was a commercial competitor to Mathematica
and Maple, one of "the big 3". It could be proprietary again as it is licensed
under BSD. Axiom contains world-class algorithms written by the people who
invented them. It is truly a valuable collection of intellectual excellence.
This is what motivates me to continue to support and develop it.

Tim Daly Axiom Lead Developer <http://axiom-developer.org>

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wtracy
On number two, if the project uses a BSD-style license, it's possible for some
corporation to create a proprietary derivative. For projects with GPL-style
licenses, the only way to do this is to get all the copyright holders
(basically all the contributors) to sign a license agreement giving the
corporation the right to create a proprietary derivative. (This occasionally
happens with one-man projects, but basically cannot happen with large projects
like the Linux kernel.)

In either case, the existing releases will still fall under the FOSS license.

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eduardordm
Most large projects require the forfeit of all copyrights before you can join
the project.

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wtracy
The only examples I can think of are projects run by the FSF and some
corporations (the projects run by Oracle, for example). You can contribute to
the Linux kernel, Apache, the BSDs, Ruby, and really most FOSS projects
without signing away anything.

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eduardordm
I stand corrected

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csixty4
1\. Depends on the project. Lots of small things, and even some big things,
are labors of love - done in spare time for little or no reward, just a chance
to put something out there and make the world a little better place. Or a
chance to get your name out there.

Bigger projects like Linux and Rails are funded by companies who depend on
them. In exchange, they get a degree of control over the platform their
business is built upon, name recognition, and goodwill from the community.

Since you mentioned Rails, I guess 37 Signals is a great example of this. They
built Rails to help build Basecamp, and they've gone on to build a thriving
business from other Rails-based apps. They're also pretty much synonymous with
Rails, which no doubt helps them land outside development work.

2\. The basic answer is "no". "Acquiring" an open source project wouldn't
negate the licensing terms of previous releases. Even if a company managed to
make future versions of a project closed-source somehow, the community would
be free to fork the most recent code and continue building their own version
under an open source license.

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eduardordm
Both open source and free software can be sold.

1\. Most projects are not funded at all. In most cases large companies
exchange human labor for influence over the project. There are also cases
where the company built something for itself and realized the publicity
generated by open sourcing it would worth more than the project. And sometimes
they are required to because of licensing.

2\. The copyright holder can create and change one or multiple licenses
anytime it wants. This is why FSF usually requires authors to transfer the
rights to them.

Most people think that open sourcing is like throwing candy out of a window.
But reality is you can open source you whole website's source code and MAYBE 2
or 3 persons will ever fork it. Robbers will look for money, not work.

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anigbrowl
1\. Varies by project. Sometimes it's all-volunteer, sometimes funded by
companies like IBM, Microsoft, whoever.

2\. No. Well, it's not impossible, but usually open-source products are
licensed in such a fashion as to prevent expropriation.

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berlinbrown
There are several fallacies in your argument. You assume that software cannot
exist without some corporations.

Open source is almost like "free" information and content on the Internet. Any
kid or adult can start a project. They can just wake up and start coding. Many
tools are free and available so they decide to start coding on their own time.

Nothing should stop the coder from starting a project.

And there are some corporations like Google that allow their developers to
work on open source projects. There are some companies that even want to
invest developer time on open projects.

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brudgers
_"There are several fallacies in your argument."_

There are only questions. There isn't an argument at all, let alone a
fallacious one.

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orbnam
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