Hi,
marc fleury wrote:
> While there is a lot of FUD, I do relate to some of the points made by MS
> guys.
> I do believe that even open source needs funding to grow and manage
> innovation :)
> I am in that spot right now and believe me it is a bitch to figure out :)
>
> Without proper "financing of research and innovation" it isn't as fast or
> powerful as proprietary funded models.
I don't agree here. At least not always.
For example, see the Linux kernel: It didn't
get much financing going from 0.02 to 2.0,
but still a lot of research and innovation
happened here.
So why do programmers research, innovate and
program for free?
It is hard to tell, and there are probably
several reasons.
Could ask similar questions on other kinds
of work where the money is small and often
not the driving force: Why does a painter
paint, a music composer compose music, or
a poet write poems?
When asking OSS programmers, painters,
composers and poets, you often hear that
they feel a "calling". Also these people
want to make themselves heard (and
sometimes immortal), and earn respect among
their peers.
It is worth noting that the hacker culture
is a gift culture, not an exchange culture.
I do not oppose money in open source
projects, but I always worry a bit if the
details of distributing it may take too
much time away from real programming.
Also, I have never seen monetary funding
as the driving force of an OSS project.
But I have seen extra-project enterprises
do commercial support for OSS projects
with great success, even if free support
is available on mailling lists. And this
success seems to trickle back to the
project in the form of (often hard-to-find)
bug fixes and better commercial acceptance.
IMO, we need a vendor giving commercial
support for JBoss, and we need it a lot
more than direct funding. And I wouldn't
mind if such a vendor keeps all their
hard earned money, as long as they
contribute bug fixes back to JBoss, and
help making JBoss more commercially
acceptable.
Just my $.02.
Best Regards,
Ole Husgaard.
