Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 12:19:43 +0200 From: Szilveszter Adam <sziszi@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> To: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Funding large Open Source projects (was Windriver, Slackware) Message-ID: <20010419121942.A15266@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> In-Reply-To: <00a701c0c8ae$95f80ce0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>; from tedm@toybox.placo.com on Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 01:56:13AM -0700 References: <20010418111526.A3210@petra.hos.u-szeged.hu> <00a701c0c8ae$95f80ce0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hello Ted, On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 01:56:13AM -0700, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > How many "bit more than sexy text editor on SourceForge" Open Source > projects > are really out there? It doesen't seem like there are that many, less if > you > subtract the innumerable Linux distributions. It seems like maybe less than > 50. I agree. > >If one such backer dumps an OpenSource project, be it because of a mergers > >& acquisitions game or for difference of opinion or whatever, the code > >remains and the developers have lost nothing in theory. But in practice... > >unless they can find a new sponsor, the project is as good as dead. > > Only the large Open Source projects would be affected. That's true, but that was the whole point:-) After all, if for some reason a disk crash takes down all of the remnants of your "sexy text editor" project at a free web hoster, you can still quite easily recover from it and the world won't be that badly shaken, either:-) But if a large project is forced to disappear from the face of the Net, than it is bound to have repercussions. I was only focusing on larger projects (although I did not make this clear initially) because they are the ones having any considerable impact on the lives of the community other than its authors. Also, this just served to point out that while you might believe that "the bigger the better protected" this is not always true... > >Software development on such world-wide scale as is the case with FreeBSD, > >(but not only) simply requires a world-class infrastructure. It needs the > >powerful FTP, CVS, cvsup servers, the many mirrors, the direct backbone > >connectivity, the paid developers. > > Does it really? I really wonder about that. About which part? All of them?:-) (I think I know what you mean, see below) > While there's a lot of truth to what you say, I think that there's one fact > that > can't be ignored - the big chunks of support are going into developer > salaries, > and into distribution site infrastructure. Yes. > The CVS servers really don't consume a tremendous amount of bandwidth, if > just the > comitters have access to them. It doesen't seem as though a few servers are > going to > represent much of a burden to anyone, and that you could easily get support > from > most ISP's for that. OK. Let's step back for a while here. While you may be right in saying that it's the end-product that matters, it's the product that's used etc, but I think that a project that does not give access to the development process itself (even if for just spectators) is missing something that cannot be easily compensated for. Let's consider a good example (because it is not an OS that can be rather self-contained), the Mozilla project. They do not seem to have the resources (and interest) to build and test on any BSD variant anymore, so if you just got the source to their releases and left to try to bring them to run on your box, you would face a big challange. But because the development process is open (and one of the best in terms of organization principles and development structures, even if the result does not always look pretty) you can test and chime in early if problems develop. Sure, it's their project, but while it's their right to not support a particular OS, it's not their best interest, if it's doable with just a bit of tweaking. While in this example support for BSDs may not be the key to success, in other cases the overall acceptance of the project may very well depend on such factors. Again, if we are talking "bigger" projects that go outside the circle of your immediate friends/collegaues and are meant to address more than your particular needs at the moment, acceptance starts to matter. This exact thing was the problem with the XFree project, too: You could get the new release when there was one out, but the development itself was not open. While this may not have prevented their overall acceptance (lacking a free alternative) it surely contributed to the fact the code has now become so complicated that only few people are actually capable of auditing it for security problems etc, and if you discount the people who actually wrote it (because they may not spot all errors, they are too intimately familiar with the code) hardly anyone remains. So most people simply prefer to think that "It oughtta work" and be done with it, but this is not what OpenSource is supposed to be about. The same thing with BIND, btw. I prefer to think of these not so much as "real" OpenSource projects, but rather remnants of that old time when hiding the source to one's program did not make a lot of sense, so if you wanted it, you got it. But this is not OpenSource, this is just "I don't care".:-) > WHat it seems to me really sucks the bandwidth is the distribution FTP > servers. Thus, > that is where most of the corporate support is going to flow. Of course, > you need > people to run these servers and so even more support is needed for salaries > and such. But without which your project will not gain wide-spread acceptance, for a number of factors. See below. > But, is it really essential to the world-class development infrastructure to > have an > FTP server that 4K simultaneous users can hit? Perhaps convincing more > people to > buy distributions instead of pulling the entire thing down over the Internet > would > go a long way towards funding the development and getting rid of our > dependence on > a single corporate sponsor to host the Project. This what OpenBSD seems to have adopted as a strategy (since they do not have much choice) but apart from the fact that it doesn't seem to work splendidly, it also is counter-productive for the project (as in: project means also a community not just code and infrastructure). I have long resented the voices on the misc@openbsd.org maillist that really sounded like selling CDs was more important than say welcoming new users or helping people. There were times when I almost could feel that "Have your official OpenBSD CD receipt ready before writing" attitude. This is simply disgusting to me. An OpenSource project, esp the bigger ones, should be about more than software. It is a way of working, thinking, socializing. Setting a good example, showing that you can do it differently than most believe, if you want. (For which reason I truly encourage OpenSource projects outside of software, too.) This attitude should not be ruined by mixing business matters into community. Also, CD distribution is bound to be limited. Why exclude a lot of people outright just because they happen to live in countries where your CDs are not sold? (For example, here in Hungary maybe you can buy the FreeBSD CDs half a year after release, which is already a lot of delay, but eventually maybe they get here, in one selected bookshop only, because the others do not order it, and other BSDs are not available at all. Of course, I could theoritcally order them from the USA or whatever, but that's theory, because I, like most Hungarians, am not good enough for my bank to issue a "real" credit card to, so only a few people have say a Visa Classic or a Mastercard that you can use to pay on the Internet with.) If you put the stuff on ftp, you at least give us guys a chance. Also, while the Internet is free for me here, I would not be necessarily able to afford buying the CD sets for every release. So... Let's just say that while this may sound like a good idea, it creates more problems IMHO than it solves. It introduces unnecessary tensions into a community, excludes close to the majority of the world's population, thereby wasting resources (people resources who could be useful for making the product better) and therefore ultimately runs counter to the idea behind OpenSource, at least IMHO. That's why these issues are so complicated:-) -- Regards: Szilveszter ADAM Szeged University Szeged Hungary To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20010419121942.A15266>