
Who Really Pays for Open Source Software? - J3L2404
http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-cms/who-really-pays-for-open-source-software-009024.php
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bryanlarsen
_In fact, 67 percent of developers polled by Evans Data Corp reported that
they spend some time developing open source software while at their primary
job. This means that some portion of the salary paid to the developer is
allocated to work not related to their job._

This means nothing of the sort. The vast majority of those developers are
working on open source software that is used by their company with the full
backing of their managers. Sure, it's a cost to the company -- open source
software is not free. But to imply that this is somehow stolen from the
company is just egregious.

I'm sure most ycombinator companies are doing the same thing. It's hard to be
ramen profitable if you're paying $100K to Oracle for a database license. Much
cheaper to have 10% of a developer tweaking rails plugins...

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lg
the graph says "non-work-related open-source projects"

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bryanlarsen
I call bull then. Look at the bar on the right: it looks like 7% of developers
spend 100% of their time working on non-related open source projects. I think
it's more likely that 7% of developers spend 100% of their time playing
farmville and reading hacker news than 7% of developers spend 100% of their
time working exclusively on _non-work-related_ OSS projects.

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djipko
I believe an excellent explanation of the whole thing was given by Joel some
time ago. <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html> And
this guy knows business models!

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davidw
Fascinating topic, but a weak treatment of it. I think you could go much
further in depth on this subject. Who pays, to whom the benefits accrue short
term, long term, and so on and so forth.

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rwl
Please, then: let me invite you to do so here!

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blahedo
_With planning and applying one or more of the techniques discussed in this
article, contributors may be able to propel their projects into the realm of
profitability._

What techniques? This whole article calls out the OSS community on its funding
sources, but doesn't particularly give any advice on how to make OSS
profitable. Unless you count the implicit suggestion to involve people with
lots of free time at work.

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markng
This smells like churnalism to me, particularly when you take into account the
history of the author : <http://www.cmswire.com/author/josette-rigsby/> (see
1. the PR notice and 2. that most of their recent articles are quite obviously
rehashed press releases.)

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rbanffy
A very long time ago, I wrote an article (in Portuguese) about it.

[http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/artigos_pt/quem-paga-a-
conta...](http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/artigos_pt/quem-paga-a-conta-do-
software-livre)

The Google-provided translation is... survivable:

[http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...](http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=pt&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dieblinkenlights.com%2Fartigos_pt%2Fquem-
paga-a-conta-do-software-livre)

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rabble
This article is complete BS. Why do people post crap like this. The vast
majority of people who do open source work, do it as related to work, which is
not their primary work.

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Dylanlacey
And what percentage of time is spent by regular employees not working on
whatever they're paid to work on?

