OneAndOneIs2

I get emails about stuff I've written in the past from time to time. I got one a little while ago from a chap named Brett, which lead to a few emails getting exchanged. So I thought it might be worth blogging the highlights in case it's of use to anyone else:

See, my general concern over this type of thing deals with the people expected to make the software grow [...] For instance, Blender. If people stopped using Modo and the like and started using Blender, it can be expected that they will all contribute to the software, make it better, profit off of it, then hire devs to make it even better. Great symbiosis, right? There's a problem, though.... what about the freeloaders? [...] There are a lot, lot, lot of freeloaders on the planet today. A very small percentage of home users buy their software anymore, they all pirate it. They don't want any part in the development and growth.

Look at it this way:

"A very small percentage of home users buy their software anymore, they all pirate it." - I wouldn't go quite that far, but piracy *is* popular.

So consider this: What's the difference between an end user who grabs the latest version of MS Office off a P2P network; and an end user who downloads the latest version of OpenOffice off their website?

For the user, nothing: He has the latest version of an office suite.

For the company, nothing: The user has got a copy of their software and they received no money for it.

The difference is, though, that Microsoft was expecting to get paid for that software, and Sun wasn't. So for MS, it counts as a loss - they didn't get the money they wanted; for Sun, it's a plus - one more user has switched to using their software. It's a fundamentally different business model, you can't apply the same school of thought to it.

The idea of open source isn't that every user should contribute back. It's that anyone who wants to contribute, can. Anyone can submit a bug patch for Firefox. Nobody can do that for IE.

Mozilla doesn't lose anything when people use its software for free. It didn't cost them anything to supply me with my copy of Firefox. When I copied Firefox from my laptop to my work PC, it didn't cost them anything. So they don't NEED every user to contribute back to them.

Mozilla is a company that produces nothing but software that they give away for free. You can download their browser, modify the source code, and release it as your own browser. Microsoft and other closed-source companies would have you believe this is an insane way to run a business, and is completely unsustainable: Giving away your product, letting other people 'resell' it, how can you profit off such a scheme?

As you can see from their audit, Mozilla had a net income of over forty million dollars in 2007.

The vast majority of its end users gives nothing back to Mozilla. And yet this pure open-source company that gives away all its code made more money in a year than I'm ever likely to.

Open-source isn't about DEMANDING that end users give something back. It's about giving end users the ABILITY to give back if they want to. It's about "standing on the shoulder of giants". It's about not having to re-invent the wheel.

If every company that wanted a rich, interactive website had to write their own scripting language and database software and web server and everything else, would we have Facebook and Wikipedia and Flickr and Google and wordpress?

Of course not. How could they have gotten their services online if they'd had to build EVERYTHING from scratch or buy expensive proprietary software?

They didn't need to. They could use a LAMP stack and get their services online using free software and open standards. They could use CSS, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, and all manner of incredibly powerful software and languages to get going and turn their bright idea into a real concept in very little time.

And when they discovered, say, a bug in the Python interpreter, they could fix it themselves and get back to business. And they could release that bugfix to the Python devs, and that way everyone else benefits from that bugfix, and the bug remains fixed in future versions so the original discoverer doesn't have to fix it every time they upgrade. And everyone's happy, and everyone benefits.

Here's another bit of trivia for you, on the open-source money front: In 2001, IBM invested one billion dollars in Linux. In January 2002, I saw on Cnet that they had already nearly recouped that billion.

There's plenty of money in FOSS. There's plenty of people developing for FOSS. Freeloaders hurt Microsoft, because they want money for their software. They don't hurt open source, because the software was given away in the first place.

But when freeloaders use Microsoft software, they have no ability or incentive to contribute in other ways. Open-source makes its living off the contributions of "freeloaders"

And it makes a very good living indeed.

in comparison to proprietary software, I feel that FOSS software is quite lagging in many respects. The GIMP is seriously lagging far behind Photoshop. [...] One of my favorite Open-source programs is Ardour. Being a musician, I've found it to be a wonderful program that serves my needs perfectly. [...] I never see a need to use another program. However, my room-mate is a music engineer, and thusly uses the more popular programs (he uses Apple's Logic). His Logic can do far, far more than my Ardour can. [...] from his point of view, Ardour may be a nice product, but it's nothing special. [...] So does the community depend on sponsorship from companies, then?

Okay, let's start with:

"The GIMP is seriously lagging far behind Photoshop"

No it isn't.

It isn't lagging at all. Not one little bit. Not by any measure.

Because Gimp isn't a Photoshop replacement. It isn't written to be a Photoshop replacement, it isn't laid out to be a Photoshop replacement. Nobody is trying to make Gimp a Photoshop replacement. (Well, actually, a few people are, but that's beside the point - they're not changing the core software to do it) It isn't in second place because it isn't in a race.

I have Photoshop installed on my computer. I also have Gimp. When I have the choice, I use Gimp every time. As far as I'm concerned, it's the better program for what I need to do. For other people, Photoshop is the better. That's fine. Use the right tool for the job. Gimp is free, there's no downside to having it installed alongside Photoshop.

FOSS isn't commercial software. It makes no sense to say it needs to be better than the commercial offering if it's going to succeed.

Take Ardour: Imagine that you were an open-source programmer who needed some music software. So you sat down and you yourself wrote Ardour, which does everything you need it to do. You know it doesn't do what Logic can, but you don't need it to, so why should you care? It does what you want, so it's as good as it needs to be.

And then you release the source code, because it costs you nothing to let other people have what you've created. And some people find that your software does all they need, too.

You, the creator, have a tool that does everything you need. Other people have got the same thing, and they didn't even have to put any effort in to get it.

Who, exactly, does it matter to that it doesn't do as much as Logic does?

You had the incentive to write the software. You wrote it. It works. Ergo, it was successful. What more do you need? That's the difference between FOSS and commercial software: FOSS just has to be good enough for its developer(s). Commercial software has to be good enough for lots of people to hand over cash. It's a completely different yardstick.

Sometimes people open-source code because they want other people to help with the coding. For them, absolutely, they need a community that gets involved. But others just write the code for their own pleasure, because it scratches an itch, or because they want something that does exactly what they want and there's no such thing already. For them, a community is an irrelevance. It might even be a nuisance. They write the code for themselves, and they're nice enough to share it. FOSS is different things to different people, you can't apply one single standard to define what makes a project a success.