[Commons-Law] What fuels Open Source?

[Pranesh Prakash]

Dear All,
A while back there was a thread in Commons-Law as to whether it is money or
the sense of voluntarism that drives Open Source.  In this blog
entry<http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/05/money_not_spare.html>,
Scott Gilbertson of Wired airs his views on the matter.  Please follow the
link to the original page for some intelligent comments.



Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Money, Not Spare Cycles, Drives Open SourceWired Magazine editor, Chris
Anderson, recently published an article on his blog, The Long Tail,
suggesting that, much as spare CPU cycles drive projects like SETI, human
"spare cycle" are powering the open source
movement<http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/05/the_awesome_pow.html>and
Web
2.0. It's a really nice metaphor, the problem is, for large open source
projects anyway, it isn't true.

While Anderson's theory may explain smaller open source projects and
web 2.0sites like Flickr, big open source projects, like the Linux
kernel, are
built not by the mythical open source volunteer, but by paid programmers
working for large corporations.

Jonathan Corbet of LWN.net released a
study<http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/>a couple of months ago that
pegged corporate contributions to the Linux
kernal at 65 percent. The breakdown of corporations involved included Red
Hat with far and away the most contributions, along with IBM, Novell, the
Linux Foundation (which employs Torvalds), Intel, and Oracle.

More recently OpenSUSE released a survey of
users<http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS9755856281.html>which found
that very few of them actually work on the distribution.
84.7 percent are simply users of the distribution. Only 1.9 percent actually
create new programs, and just 0.9 percent work on patches.

The salient point isn't that open source is somehow tainted by corporate
involvement, but rather that open source is ultimately a capitalist venture
like any other software.

I'll confess the Anderson's notion of volunteers creating software in their
spare time has more appeal, though like the blogger at
Neosmart<http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/spare-cycles-and-open-source/>,
I disagree that it's out of boredom.

Which brings me to the best part of the open source community. Open source's
brilliance is not that it's created by volunteers, but that it *could* be
created by volunteers.

Unlike proprietary software, with closed teams of programmers, open source
projects are open to any contribution.

Just because the majority of the Linux kernel comes from corporate employees
doesn't mean that those contributions are the most significant.

It could well be that the corporate contributions were largely meaningless
for the average user, but the work of one person fixed the glitch that had
bothered thousands.

And for many the appeal of open source is not contributing downtime to
development, but using tools that can incorporate the collective wisdom of
the community.
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