
The Long Beard's Revenge - twampss
http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1286998492.html
======
mcmc
In agreement with what Zed is saying, you would be shocked by the number of
companies, YC companies especially, who use Orbited (www.orbited.org) but
never ever mention it, contribute a patch, offer me a job, or really add
anything of value to the project.

Great, that's their prerogative... its MIT licensed software. But I can tell
you, after this sort of interaction for years, I no longer invest my time in
Orbited, and instead I bill $250/hr to share my expertise with consumer facing
internet startup companies.

One _actual_ data point to add this discussion anyway.

[ edit for spelling ]

~~~
mcmc
Couple of quick responses:

pquerna, gridspy, thanks for your responses! I didn't mean to sound _quite_ so
cynical. Mainly I am venting my frustration at the lack of a dedicated
developer to maintain the project, especially after I've seen so many success
stories.

wrt AGPL: In orbited's case -- b/c it is a socket proxy -- the AGPL would
really have _no impact_ whatsoever on users. No one would be linking any of
their code in-process, and so there would really be no requirement for them to
AGPL any of their custom back-end logic. Besides, I don't really believe in
trying to force users down a particular path. My hope is always that freedom
and choice helps build trust with your user base, which ultimately results in
the healthiest community.

Yet, when I started Orbited 3-4 years ago, I never intended to be married to
the project forever. My hope has always been that some
people/projects/companies that are depending on the Orbited would be willing
to commit substantial engineering resources to fix bugs and implement new
features, and from those contributions some new core committers would emerge.
Unfortunately, my work still accounts for about 95% of the 0.7.x branch which
is the last stable release.

I feel like Orbited is far behind, considering I haven't been involved in a
release in about 2 years, and no one else has really stepped up. I am always
shocked, truthfully, when I hear success stories and see people building
applications with it still. The code base has remained unchanged through about
10 browser releases.

~~~
gridspy
Yes, I noticed this inactivity when I started working with Orbited. However, I
always assumed you had reached a natural conclusion and stopped.

------
smokinn
Another possibility is simply that people are contributing less because both
the upfront and long-term cost of making a profit themselves on their code has
gone radically down.

Optimizely launched today. Normally A/B testing is simply a framework feature
someone (or rather many people, typically independently) implements and puts
out there. Instead, with a little more work and very little upfront capital
you can turn that feature you would've put out as open source into a revenue
generating product. For lots of people it's not worth turning into a product
if your servers are going to cost you thousands of dollars a month from day
one but if it's just 20-50$/month then the economics change entirely. From the
community you lost all the people who would give something away for free
simply because it would've been too big a hassle and risk to turn it into
something profitable.

Another good example is <http://directededge.com> . An adaptive recommendation
service seems like the ideal fun project to hack on as an open source
API/library. But now it's a subscription product too. I'm sure many others can
be found.

~~~
zedshaw
That's actually another good way to say it, and is sort of what I said. But,
not everyone has the same risk tolerance so it can't be the sole cause
otherwise people would have done it sooner than 2009. Another contributing
factor is corporations taking advantage of the commons. Combine the two and
you get our current situation.

~~~
stcredzero
For the newer/younger readers, I believe that "commons" refers to this:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons>

------
neilk
I don't know where Zed gets the idea there was an "unwritten contract" between
FLOSS developers and industry. In my experience, businesses have freeloaded
and withheld recognition whenever it was remotely possible.

If you go back to the Transmeta years, even Linus Torvalds was doing the
kernel only part-time for a while. Full-time FLOSS development has always been
rare.

There's an undertone of anger in this post that there is no suitable industry
job out there for the developer of Mongrel. Maybe that is a shame, but I just
don't find it as surprising as Zed does, I guess.

There is a crying need for some other way to fund infrastructure software
projects.

~~~
joe_the_user
I couldn't decide whether to vote you up or down.

Agree that there's crying need for some other way to fund infrastructure
software projects.

Disagree that Full-time FLOSS development has been rare since since Linux
became what it currently is through a lot of full-time, paid work.

Etc...

I'm pretty damn impressed with the directions and comments of Zed. He's by far
the "realist" person in the industry.

~~~
raganwald
> I couldn't decide whether to vote you up or down.

My policy is when a post or comment has one grain of insight or new ideas
amongst a bushel of wrong-headed chaff, I vote up. After all, I have a fully-
working pattern-match filter built into my brain, and so does everyone else.
The world is a better place when people are encouraged to make positive
contributions.

------
cpr
Couldn't the decline just be more or less the shredding of the economy in the
past 2-3 years? Fewer companies with extra cash around to have people spend
time contributing back to OSS projects.

~~~
btilly
That is possible.

It is also possible that Ohloh's tracking is not perfect. They can't track
things that haven't been reported to them, and that process can take time. So
I'd expect under reporting of recent changes. (Not necessarily as much as we
see though.)

~~~
zedshaw
Their tracking is probably imperfect, but it seems like a reasonable
indicator. I'm still waiting to see if their data has some flaw, or maybe if
github has more.

However, that data wasn't the point, just an indicator.

~~~
chmod
<http://www.ohloh.net/p/numpy>

Numpy must be stealing from other projects, as they have -150KLOC

~~~
barrkel
To make that clear to others - like me - that didn't see it first time, that's
_negative_ 150K lines of code.

~~~
cdavid
This is weird :) We recently moved to github (where recent is a few days), so
I wonder if that's linked

Also, numpy is not mainly written in modula-2.

~~~
dmm
Hmm I don't see a denial of the "Very few source code comments" analysis... ;)

~~~
cdavid
Nope, nor does it need one. Source comments are weakly correlated with code
quality :)

Moreoever, you have to be careful about numbers of lines-based statistics for
numpy and scipy, because a lot of code is generated or 3rd party libraries
(that are integrated because no distribution has them packaged, not even
debian). Also, cloc gives me vastly different numbers, with a lot of comments
and all (but again, not very meaningful because of generated/integrated code).
ohlo stats are not very reliable in my experience, at least for the packages I
am involved with.

------
chipsy
I think there are two things driving any perceived slowdown in OSS. One is the
economy, and the other is platform changes.

A down economy has unusual effects on free time: the less-competent are first
to go and most likely to stay unemployed, while the best and brightest will be
retained and overworked. This would deprive OSS of much of its premier talent.

We are also seeing a major platform shift on lots of fronts; from traditional
desktop computing to alternate form factors(phone, tablet), from big iron to
commodity computing, and from C, C++ or Java console or WIMP-style apps
towards modernized browser apps, which have an increasingly rich set of
options for UX. All of this causes a huge upset in the very gradual process of
open-source development and encourages a gold rush of low-tech apps that
exploit the new platforms.

I don't think this leads to a "Long Beard's Revenge" scenario, though, as the
next thing that's going to hit the browser, now that it's getting more
capable, is to make webapps that are client-heavy and cheap on the back-end.
Open-source stacks will correspondingly start building up more heavily on the
JS end of things. After some time, we'll see more open-source JS apps. And
then who knows what will happen?

OSS is perpetually underfunded and overexploited; it's a commons good, after
all. And when OSS authors "put themselves out of business" by writing
excellent software, they've essentially fulfilled their economic destiny.

But I don't think industry is to blame for the particular bias Zed discusses.
It goes back to the state of the economy: Income inequality locks people out
of open source, as fully participating in it is a luxury of self-
actualization, one which takes lots of time and effort. At the same time, if
most of the money in the world is sitting on a few rich people, the best way
to get their attention as consumers is to make slick toy apps.

That is, if things were right with the world, our apps would be extremely
boring-looking, very useful and functional, and mostly open-source, because
that would mean nobody is feeling pressured to monetize their software.

~~~
sireat
Alternative hypothesis is that many highly qualified technically but not adept
at office politics (or other soft skills) people might be let go. These highly
skilled people might just stay in "basement" and produce FOSS because of their
idealism and lack of other options.

In other words, instead of kissing ass in the office they would rather produce
kick ass software on their own.

------
rmoriz
It's not only about the "Long Beards" in backend programming.

Let's look 10 years back: To become a popular "web company" you've probably
had to invest _a lot_ of cash in advertisements. Today strong social
networking (blogging, twitter, HN, fb, linkedin) in theory allows the
developers/builders/creators/"marketers" direct access to the market without
having a middle men and for a few bucks.

So it's all about "full stack self promotion": You've to sell AND deliver
awesome quality on a daily basis.

Some good and hard-working will be able to make bigger profits themselves _if_
they learn self marketing skills (=> 37signals, peldi/balsamiq, amyhoy … ) and
actually WANT to sell. Many of the old school OSS developers don't want to
sell themselves as an "ego brand" on a daily basis. They just want to do cool
technical things and get enough money for a living. They are awesome brains
but often have autistic-like social/selling skills and a completely different
motivation.

~~~
zedshaw
Bullshit. They may promote some illusion of quality, but having seen both
internet startups and massive banks I can tell you they're huge liars. They're
all about the illusion of quality and selling it, and not any actual quality.

Banks collapsed because they had crap IT. This is why Bear Stearns has a
20000% increase (yes, percent) in failed trades in the last two days of their
life and didn't know about it. Bad IT also let them create these derivatives
and have no idea how much risk was actually in them, hell, how much money was
in them.

Startups are going to go through the same thing. They're lack of attention to
detail of the total product quality while promoting their "full stack" as if
it were high quality is already starting to bite them. I know a lot of these
exits you're seeing would have been higher if they had better operations than
they do.

So this myopic view that it's all about sales at any cost and "user
experience" only does nothing for the industry.

~~~
j_baker
"Banks collapsed because they had crap IT. This is why Bear Stearns has a
20000% increase (yes, percent) in failed trades in the last two days of their
life and didn't know about it. Bad IT also let them create these derivatives
and have no idea how much risk was actually in them, hell, how much money was
in them."

I think you have a good point, but you're stretching it a bit here. Bear
Sterns was dead before the last 2 days of their life.

~~~
dasil003
I read those two sentences as independent assertions, but you seem to be
conflating them.

------
j_baker
I think a better explanation for this is the tragedy of the commons. Do
companies want open source software contributions to keep up? Yeah. As long as
those contributions are made on someone else's time.

~~~
mtts
The tragedy of the commons is a myth. It doesn't exist. If it's truly "common"
the companies that have an interest in it contribute and, guess what, that's
exactly what they're doing: IBM, Oracle, Redhat: everyone pays to have Linux
developed.

The problem is that a lot of these "product people" don't perceive themselves
as being part of "the commons". To them a lot of open source software is
simply something that for some reason exists and can be had for free, not
something that took effort to build.

To illustrate that the tragedy of the commons really is a myth, consider the
recent complaints against Ubuntu: they were found to be freeloading on the
commons of desktop Linux and were reprimanded for it by the other contributors
and users of that commons. What did emphatically not happen is that other
contributors followed their example. Red Hat continues to develop Gnome, for
example, even though they know their work will be profited from by Ubuntu
without Ubuntu contributing something back.

------
andrewljohnson
My start-up contributes to open source (mostly the route-me framework for
iPhone mapping).

We see it as good business. We are known to be route-me experts, which has
helped us sell our platform for mobile map dev (and dev devices).

~~~
zedshaw
Well then thank you. I mean it's not my project, but it helps other people.

~~~
andrewljohnson
I guess I see it as a duty to some extent, plus I get a kick from contributing
code. But honestly, the main reason is business. We want other companies to
use our mapping platform, which uses route-me. When you get introduced to
someone as a "route-me expert," it makes closing the deal about 1000X easier.
Companies like Red Hat and CloudMade were built on that principle.

I also think the death of open source is greatly exaggerated. It's natural
that contributions would fall off, as FOSS gets more mature, and just requires
polish. As it turns out, it's not nearly as fun to polish software as it is to
write something new. And there's endless polishing work on all software.

This may be the single reason why open source isn't more dominant - because
you actually have to pay guys to do the dirty work at the end, or they'll go
back to hacking something more fun.

------
davidw
> Consumer internet companies however are just not bothering with this. They
> frequently will use software and then slander the author of it claiming it's
> "crap".

I seem to remember a certain Debian article along those lines.

~~~
zedshaw
I do _not_ use Debian. I have Ubuntu on a laptop to support my user base who
use Debian, but I run ArchLinux, Fedora, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OSX on all my
other computers and servers. I also don't make money on these systems, or I
pay for them, and I contribute back extensively. So don't compare me to the
likes of Meebo and Twitter.

I also consider Debian to be exactly like these companies who take _my_ work,
butcher it, then pass the support costs and blame on to me. Considering I am a
prolific contributor to the open source cause, and _I've_ never butchered a
Debian package when they've butchered my software, I'm completely justified in
criticizing them for their actions.

~~~
trevelyan
Respectfully, it is better not to criticize open source developers and
maintainers publicly if you want more/better open source software. Everyone
gets frustrated and at a certain point people take their toys and go home.

~~~
davidw
Criticism is fine, as long as it's respectful and constructive, which were two
things that were in very short supply in Zed's Debian rant.

Also, Zed writes:

> I also don't make money on these systems, or I pay for them, and I
> contribute back extensively. So don't compare me to the likes of Meebo and
> Twitter.

Debian makes no money on its systems, and contributes back extensively too in
many cases. So comparing it to the likes of Microsoft and asking for people to
"attack" it was really uncalled for.

------
tjmc
Zed's right, but SaaS providers will have to start taking the "back end" a lot
more seriously as they become more mission critical.

Virgin Blue's hosted airline reservation system recently went down, costing
the company $15-20 million by their estimates.
([http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Virgin-
pd...](http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Virgin-
pd20101011-A52GE?OpenDocument&src=srch))

I wonder if Navitaire-Accenture, now facing one of the biggest IT lawsuits in
Australian history, wish they'd had a few more long beards around...

------
mwcremer
_A web framework let you work on the back-end, but had the interesting quality
that anyone who used it pretty much had to admit it or contact you._

I wonder about this. Seems like there are plenty of rails / django / joomla
sites out there, but not sure how many proudly display the "Powered By" badge,
or contribute back.

~~~
rmoriz
On how many sites do you see a note (not even in the html source or http
response header) on what it's built?

It was the motivation for me to build <http://IsItRails.com/> because in
general so few sites tell something about the used technology stack.

From time to time I'm receiving mails telling me to remove a listed site
because of some "company policy"… wtf.

~~~
sovande
IsItRails.com; Error 503 Service Unavailable. So I guess it is rails.

~~~
rmoriz
had to reboot the system because I've added more RAM to the VM (because 'gem
mirror' uses _A LOT_ )

------
nkurz
I agree with most of the points in the article, but I'd point most of the
blame on the rise of the Mobile Apps. Those who would have been the next
generation of open source programmers are instead releasing closed source
apps. Some of the reasons are the same as Zed points out (lower bar for
'making a company out of it') but some of the direction comes from the
corporations backing the App Stores and selling the mobile devices.

For many common tasks, there are a plethora of Apps out there the do pretty
much the same simple thing, in a mostly functional but considerably klunky
manner. In the open source world, one of these would take the lead,
incorporate the best features of the competitors, and then developers would
pitch their efforts behind the winner increasing the lead even farther.
Instead, every week there's a new closed-source work-alike.

It feels like a regression back to the pre-open-source days of shareware.
Instead of a pooling of efforts, everyone is duplicating the work that's
already been done. Instead of building a solid foundation, there's a
glorification of throwing something together in an afternoon from "premade
parts" and "stock libraries" --- perhaps they grow on trees --- and putting it
out there for sale.

Android is considered the more open environment, but on my Linux based Android
phone, I don't know if there are any open-source Apps that I use --- maybe the
Camera is stock? In contrast, on my desktop (also Linux) I can't offhand think
of any programs I use regularly that aren't open source (I guess Flash, if you
count it as a program).

I don't think this is by accident. Why for example does Google have such a
lousy closed-source email App? I feel certain a forked open-sourced version
would be vastly improved within weeks, and anyone who didn't think so would
still be free to use the original. Believe it or not, it's actually reasonably
common practice to disassemble an App like this to byte code, and then try to
patch this and reassemble it into a working App.
(<http://code.google.com/p/smali>)

At one point I thought it was the phone companies that were setting this
course, but now I'm not so sure. Microsoft tried to kill off open source
through FUD and marketing, but surprisingly they didn't have the clout. But
now Apple and Google might just kill it off by creating a thriving business
for 99 cent Apps --- because who's going to release the source for a whole
afternoon's work when someone might just steal it and put a closed-source
version up on the App store and maybe become a millionaire?

~~~
aaronkaplan
If you're talking about the Android email app, there actually is a fork,
called K-9, and it's significantly better.

~~~
nkurz
No, I'm referring to the Google Gmail app. Although Google owns Android, there
is a large distinction between the open-source Android base and the closed-
source Google apps. K9 sounds like a fine improvement over the stock email
app, and an example of what would happen if Google would release the Gmail app
as open-source. Yet they choose not to --- why?

~~~
billswift
So people can't get the functionality without Google being able to data-mine.

------
nerme
Put it in your contract!

I modify every contract I sign to include stipulations for open-source
software.

Most companies couldn't care less about releasing bits and pieces of their
code base as open-source projects.

Business schools have been preaching to students for decades about how
marketplaces have become consumer focused and not product focused. They
already think that the really important part of doing business is to focus on
finding out who wants what, regardless of what the product is.

As a developer, it is your prerogative to ask! If you run in to any hesitation
from the higher-ups, just work on it for a little bit... it probably isn't
going to run against their "big picture" objectives.

~~~
hagridlove
Could you clarify more on this? What stipulations do you add? To me it seems
like there is a lot of legal risk to giving an employee the ability to release
code, so they just put everyone under a blanket clause that says no to open
source.

~~~
nerme
For one, I list open-source projects that I contribute to and plan on using
and enhancing as part of whatever business objectives I'm being hired to work
towards.

Also, I add in a clause that states I will more than likely release aspects of
the project under an open-source license. Nothing binding, but I like to have
it in writing on the same piece of paper that ensures I get paid for whatever
I do. Their lawyers always find a way to bill a few hours worth of figuring
out the language. :)

The only thing I ever get from people is something along the lines of "hmm, we
don't normally get this request, but no one seems to have a problem with it."

Development teams and managers love it because it means you're writing nice,
modular code.

I've never had anyone take issue when, instead of burying some specific bit of
functionality within business logic, abstracting things out to a library. In
fact, most people would agree that that is good habit to have. ;)

When it is finished you just talk to someone up the chain about releasing it.
Normally saying something along the lines of "hey, we might get people who
don't work for this company enhancing this feature for us" really helps to
sway their decision in your (and my hippie-dippie share things for the greater
good) favor.

Here's the language from a recent contract:

\-------------

4 . Ownership.

A. Assignment. Consultant agrees that all copyrightable material, notes,
records, drawings, designs, inventions, improvements, developments,
discoveries and trade secrets conceived, discovered, developed or reduced to
practice by Consultant, solely or in collaboration with others, during the
term of this Agreement and arising out of or in connection with performing the
Services under this Agreement (collectively, “Inventions”), are the sole
property of the Company except that Consultant may contribute certain
modifications to Open Source projects as set forth in Sections 4.A.1 through
4.A.3. Consultant also agrees to assign (or cause to be assigned) and hereby
irrevocably assigns fully to the Company all Inventions and any copyrights,
patents, mask work rights or other intellectual property rights relating to
all Inventions.

( 1 ) Open Source Projects. A software project is said to be an Open Source
project when its project materials such as source code are published publicly
and its software license permits the combination of project materials with
other software project materials without fee and commonly with no or limited
exclusivity or other limits on use.

( 2 ) Combined Projects. Consultant may from time to time in the course of
performing Services and subject to approval by the Company use Open Source
projects exclusively licensed under the MIT License to develop Inventions.
During and after the use of Open Source projects, Consultant may add, change,
improve or otherwise make modifications to Open Source project source code or
other materials and may contribute these and only these modifications to the
Open Source projects provided that these modifications do not contain
Confidential Information and subject to the terms of the applicable Open
Source project license and the project’s administrative rules.

( 3 ) Notification of use. Consultant has attached hereto a list of Open
Source projects that Consultant may use to create Inventions and to which
Consultant would like to contribute back non-confidential modifications.
Consultant will provide prior written notice to the Company prior to using any
additional Open Source projects to which Consultant would like to contribute
back non-confidential modifications; and such use shall be subject to approval
by the Company.

------
mhd
One difference that I notice in FLOSS contributions, is that a lot of the Web
2.0 company/founder/programmer input is in the form of the pieces of software,
quite often reinventing the wheel a tad bit. Probably because contribution to
the bigger existing projects takes a lot of time that startup members don't
have, and frankly, is often beyond the usual skill level of a lot of them…
(inexperience, wrong language etc.)

------
digitallogic
> I believe, and you'll call me crazy, but the indicator for this second trend
> will be a focus on automated testing (not just unit testing)...

I get that for most companies that are developing software it is to support
some other profit center and not their primary focus. They hire subpar
engineers because that's all they really need (and they're not compitent
enough to tell the difference), so a lack of automation in this context,
especially test automation, is not surprising to me in the least.

But the idea that you would have a software based profit center that isn't
automatically tested, especially with the competitive nature of the web
requiring rapid turn around on features, absolutely blows my mind. Are people
firing from the hip and hoping nothing breaks or clicking every link on your
site? In which case you're either way too overconfident in your own abilities
or have no value for your own time.

------
astrofinch
>I believe, and you'll call me crazy, but the indicator for this second trend
will be a focus on automated testing (not just unit testing) and operations
cost at consumer internet companies. Right now I think maybe 5% or 10% of
consumer internet companies even run one bit of test automation, hell
automation at all. Look for this as an indicator that they've figured out
automation reduces costs and increases agility.

<http://saucelabs.com/> is a company I know of in this space, but their
product _SUCKS_ (on Ubuntu/Firefox at least) and they didn't respond to my
complaint emails (or fulfill their promise to remind me to cancel my trial
subscription before I had to start paying for it). If someone wants to do
automated browser testing right that would be awesome.

------
tptacek
Doesn't the founder of the libpurple project work at Meebo? Since pretty much
the beginning of the company?

~~~
mcmc
That isn't correct.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Spencer_(computer_engineer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Spencer_\(computer_engineer\))

------
bergie
Another aspect that may contribute here is that more and more FOSS developers
are doing it as full-time paid employees of big companies. When you move from
intense, motivated programming to the conservative and meeting-full corporate
environment, your productivity is bound the decrease.

------
ifesdjeen
I might be wrong, although I have a feeling that recent slowdown of opensource
contribution is caused (at least sometimes) by the maintainers/commiters and
"core teams" behind projects. You can check HN/Stackoverflow/Proggit/Forums
for "how to start contributing to opensource". Answers are similar: find
yourself a project, and be active there. But that's not that easy, most of
time, due to time and knowledge boundaries.

Sometimes it's not like that. There's a lot of friendly people, who encourage
newcomers, and realize that if they opensourced something, it's not theirs
anymore, it belongs to community. I just wish there were more people who're
that friendly and involve more and more team players to get stuff done in
their projects.

For instance, i have some feature for my product, that requires extension of
the framework I'm working with. My actions are following: check whether it's
already done -> ok, not done -> build a simple prototype, proof of concept ->
go create an issue / start discussion / show your prototype to maintainers or
community.

So, after the last step most of time i was getting stuck. Either I'm doing
stuff in a wrong way, but most of commits that were followed by the same path,
weren't getting through. First maintainer sees it, says that we won't do it
since that's not in our primary field of interest, and closes the issue.
Reopening and trying to involve more people into discussion doesn't lead to
the success, since dominated opinion was already stated out, and people tend
to agree with people they know and trust.

Second approach. Fixing the issues you're facing. You're using some stable
version of software (not cutting-edge), and notice that something went wrong.
First google request gives you a link to a patch. So, your work is not
required anymore. If it didn't, you still should write a unit-test and prove
that that stuff was caused by framework, not your software bundle. Having not
much or no open source contribution makes that process long. If not - you
succeed and provide a patch or wait until someone fixes it in a better way.

Third approach. You don't have any features that you lack, and you didn't face
any unfixed issues during development. But you want to pay back to the
community, since you're thankful. You go to the bug tracker, and try to find a
suitable bug for yourself. Often by the time you come up with a prototype,
gurus already get it fixed. So, you're out of process again. You should really
dive into that and spend long hours to get to know source code very well
first, get acquainted with active people there. It's never been easy.

------
robryan
Same as with layoffs, big corporations can use the "global financial crisis"
to scale back OSS work if there only motivation was to not look like the bad
guy.

------
loewenskind
Personally I see what's going on as just regular capitalism at work. A new
thing was discovered (the internet) and people tried different ways of
exploiting it to provide value. One of the tools people used was loss leader
[1]. Now people seem to be putting less faith in the loss leader strategy for
various reasons and switching back to a "pay up front" or "pay as you go"
model.

It's true that a lot of companies have been consuming loss leader products but
not the products that cover the costs (e.g. not giving the creator of the
software a job, not purchasing an upgrade, etc.). This is equivalent to buying
milk and nothing else at e.g. Walmart. They wont stop you. They probably don't
even have a provision for people who buy nothing but milk over and over. They
don't need one because they've spent a _long_ time developing techniques to
make sure you wont do that. In fact, if someone did start doing that it would
be a good indication to the company that they need to adjust something. The
internet hasn't been at this nearly as long as retail so it's no surprise that
a feeling out process is going on.

Existing (stable) software has a very tangible value. With it you can
accomplish much more than without it. You can take on more contracts and/or
charge higher rates than you could without it. I think the fact that
developers have previously been able to provide complete products by taking a
smorgasbord of loss leader items and bundling them together with a little bit
of their own glue was a market oversight that is now being corrected [2]. We
can still be profitable if paying for the software we use. What would e.g. a
home builder do if nails he used to buy at loss leader prices were suddenly
priced at a profit? He wouldn't go out of business, he would pass the costs on
one way or another.

Of course one could say "but I did pay them! I contributed 10 patches!", but
this doesn't work because what happens if _all_ clients "pay" this way? You
have to have some way of enticing clients into buying your other products
(e.g. hiring you into their company, etc.). In retail this works out ok in
practice because companies tend to all do loss leader on the same things
(everyone does milk for example). In software we're not all selling the same
product so you can have situations where developer/company A has best-in-class
product X as loss leader and product Y for a premium, while developer B has
best-in-class product Y and sells Z for a premium. External parties take X
from A, Y from B and Z from a vendor that is able to sell it cheaper because
they aren't using it to cover losses on some loss leader product.

I think a lot of people have been blind to what's actually been going on
because there has been (for a lack of a better phrase) religious zealotry
involved. People saw (and participated in) "free software" and assumed that
everything was changing. It was a bold new world where everything was going to
be free! Except rent, groceries, etc. [3] It wasn't. It was just plain old
capitalism that existed before we were born and will almost certainly still
being going on after we're all dead.

[1] Give away your code and get one or more of:

a) a job based on your proven expertise (e.g. Alan Cox)

b) a paid contract for providing support (e.g. Redhat)

c) more traditional loss leader model of giving away part of the offering
while making the costs up elsewhere (e.g. "freemium", etc.)

d) advertising with the free product

[2] This would be equivalent to Walmart doing loss leader with meat, Safeway
with bread, Target with vegetables, Home Depot with tables/chairs, Hobby Lobby
with plates/silverware and us opening a hamburger shop.

[3] This isn't to say that e.g. the free software movement doesn't have a good
moral foundation. I think they do. It was just never realistic to think that
software can join this global gift economy while nothing else does. It would
also be very unrealistic to think all other industries would look at what was
happening and say "gosh! Lets give all _our_ stuff away free to!".

------
alanh
I hate to be so snarky, but if you’re going to use a font for your headings
that is so big the _apostrophes_ are 20×20px, you might as well use proper
quote marks instead of ASCII primes.

~~~
raganwald
Help me understand: What is there about this constructive feedback that
belongs in the HN comments as opposed to a helpful email send directly to Zed?

------
sswam
I think if committing has decreased over the past couple of years it's
probably due to the so-called 'global financial crisis', I guess people have
to work more and don't have so much free time to hack on open source.

~~~
bartl
Nah... I think just everything has already been invented, so there's no more
need to start new projects... ;-)

