Who Really Pays for Open Source Software? | Hacker News Reader

Who Really Pays for Open Source Software?

cmswire.com

17 pointsJ3L240413 comments

In fact, 67 percent of developers polled by Evans Data Corp reported that they spend some time developing open source software while at their primary job. This means that some portion of the salary paid to the developer is allocated to work not related to their job.

This means nothing of the sort. The vast majority of those developers are working on open source software that is used by their company with the full backing of their managers. Sure, it's a cost to the company -- open source software is not free. But to imply that this is somehow stolen from the company is just egregious.

I'm sure most ycombinator companies are doing the same thing. It's hard to be ramen profitable if you're paying $100K to Oracle for a database license. Much cheaper to have 10% of a developer tweaking rails plugins...

The article also curiously lists IBM exclusively as a "software" company, which seems like an even more clear weasel omission to push an agenda.

the graph says "non-work-related open-source projects"

I call bull then. Look at the bar on the right: it looks like 7% of developers spend 100% of their time working on non-related open source projects. I think it's more likely that 7% of developers spend 100% of their time playing farmville and reading hacker news than 7% of developers spend 100% of their time working exclusively on non-work-related OSS projects.

Damn you're right. I came here to post exactly the same thing as the parent when I saw your comment

I believe an excellent explanation of the whole thing was given by Joel some time ago. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html And this guy knows business models!

Fascinating topic, but a weak treatment of it. I think you could go much further in depth on this subject. Who pays, to whom the benefits accrue short term, long term, and so on and so forth.

Please, then: let me invite you to do so here!

With planning and applying one or more of the techniques discussed in this article, contributors may be able to propel their projects into the realm of profitability.

What techniques? This whole article calls out the OSS community on its funding sources, but doesn't particularly give any advice on how to make OSS profitable. Unless you count the implicit suggestion to involve people with lots of free time at work.

This smells like churnalism to me, particularly when you take into account the history of the author : http://www.cmswire.com/author/josette-rigsby/ (see 1. the PR notice and 2. that most of their recent articles are quite obviously rehashed press releases.)

A very long time ago, I wrote an article (in Portuguese) about it.

http://www.dieblinkenlights.com/artigos_pt/quem-paga-a-conta...

The Google-provided translation is... survivable:

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...

This article is complete BS. Why do people post crap like this. The vast majority of people who do open source work, do it as related to work, which is not their primary work.

And what percentage of time is spent by regular employees not working on whatever they're paid to work on?

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