article on open source

[John Abreau]

TonStanco at aol.com writes:

>  These are follow-up questions to the one I posed to the open source community
>  for my proposed article in Internet.com's Boardwatch magazine on a royalty
>  system to pay developers in open source. I'd like to get community feedback
>  on these, too. I write an Internet Business Law monthly column for
>  Boardwatch <www.boardwatch.com> and I'm writing a series on open source. [If
[rest of draft deleted]

As I see it, your article essentially boils down to a proposal to dissolve
the open source community and replace its core strengths with a more
conventional, money-based system. Open source developers already get paid,
in code: if 100 developers each contribute 1% of the code in a project,
then they each gave 1% and received the other 99% as payment. 

Remember that they're not writing this stuff for a "market"; they're writing 
it for their own use, and in the absence of open source they'd have to write
100% of the code themselves, thus reinventing the wheel 100 times over.
The fact that another 10,000 people might also find the solution useful is
a secondary detail, and by letting them use the solution freely, they become
a pool of potential new developers that will contribute more new code in
the future.

I've heard a lot of arguments about open source and money. Claims that the
open source model is unsustainable and naive, and *must* be replaced by
a money-based system in order to succeed, have been bandied about for
years. The current high visibility of the open source is an existence proof
that these arguments are nonsense, that the open source model does in fact
work quite well.


--
John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix 
Email: jabr at blu.org / URL: http://www.blu.org
ICQ#28611923 / AIM abreauj
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