David Herron's Blog

Badness of open source business models

Dave Gilbert has an interesting blog entry, The Badness of JFree, quoting an email he received complaining about the business model he uses with JFreeChart. This points to a bigger issue of different ways to monetize work on an open source project. In his case the software is free and open source, but he sells documentation. His correspondent is finding this to be offensive.

All through it his correspondent says "Open source does not mean ... X". Clearly whoever wrote that has a particular conception of "Open Source" which goes beyond the official definitions ... the official definition is primarily about the license of the source code, and it doesn't cover licensing or distribution of anything else. (ref: opensource.org)

Since JFreeChart is Dave's project he gets to do with it as he wishes.

Some project authors write books related to their project. How is this any different from what Dave is doing?

Taking a step back for a moment ... you have a project 'P' .. to be open source the code for 'P' has to be distributed in the open source model. But there are ancillary items related to 'P'. Are those ancillary items part of P? Or are they separate from P?

My thought is it's up to the project leader to decide what is part of the project deliverables and what isn't.

For example let's take some of the issues around the OpenJDK project and its ancillary items. Like, the JCK or the platform and language specification. What we've done with the OpenJDK project is to open source Sun's implementation of Java. Well, 95% of Sun's implementation anyway. We didn't open source the JCK or other TCK's and we didn't open source the specifications.

We at Sun are treating those as ancillary items. As ancillary items they are not within the scope of the OpenJDK project. But it seems some people in the public may be thinking "Sun Open Sourced 'Java'" and be thinking that should mean we open sourced everything related to Java. Um... no. As the project leader we at Sun have chosen a specific path of what is in or outside the scope of the OpenJDK project. That's the role of every project leader, to decide what's inside or outside the scope of the project.

Comments

• 100%

  Posted by: evanx on May 29, 2007 at 02:16 PM

• Valid point, I think everyone connected with open-source must have seen this from some segment of their customers.Sadly some folks think open-source means: - everything connected with the open-source product is free - we (the developers) are so happy that you use our software that we are happy to receive your feature requests as "bug-reports" and provide you endless hours of fee support too - we (pesky developers again) don't need money (only love?)I think those holding these views are in the minority, but it does bother me that anyone would somehow think that software developers should sit on the road, tapping furiously into a laptop (needing no power and presumably using free wi-fi), while wearing a sign "buy me a burger buddy" ;)

  Posted by: colmsmyth on May 29, 2007 at 04:47 PM

• JFreeChar and JFreeReport are great projects. I've used them many times in projects at work. I've never really needed the docs and demo code but I normally have the people I work for pay for it because I want to support the project. Really if people are upset that the documentation isn't free .. go start a Wiki or something. The most important part is the code and thats free.

  Posted by: aberrant on May 30, 2007 at 05:28 AM

• Those views may be in the minority, but I get the feeling that the view is still widely held -even though most people will not articulate the opinion so directly.
  

  Posted by: luano on May 30, 2007 at 05:44 AM

• "we (the developers) are so happy that you use our software that we are happy to receive your feature requests as "bug-reports" and provide you endless hours of fee support too
  "
  That's far from limited to "open source" software. In fact it's far more common if customers have to pay for feature upgrades but not for bugfixes (as I experienced in the past).

  "- we (pesky developers again) don't need money (only love?)"
  Everyone knows software doesn't cost anything to make. If it did, why can you download it all for free from P2P networks?
  And there lies the real problem. People are becoming to expect that all software is gratis, created instantaneously and that no human effort is involved that requires investment (like food and clean bedsheets once in a while). I know one other person who created a piece of free (but not open source, he can't release the source because it contains proprietary information) software. When he asked for donations because he could no longer afford to pay for development out of his own income he got death threats for daring to ask people to pay and daring to "threaten" to stop development if people didn't pay up. He decided to go commercial and start selling it instead, can't blame him. After nearly a decade of giving his work away for free that was the response, plus a grand total of $500 in donations from 5 people out of a userbase of almost a million.

  Posted by: jwenting on May 30, 2007 at 11:19 PM

• I think maybe os happened at the scale we see to day because it had to: It was the answer to the software crisis. Not because people wanted (in the first place) to do work for free, but it was the only way to get code generated. With one solution comes often new problems, because the success of os the price of software has dropped to an average close to 0, and that may become a problem for maintaining productivity. Perhaps that is the new software crisis.

  Posted by: aha42 on May 31, 2007 at 09:13 AM

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