(fwd) article on open source

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

I am currently managing an open source project (please see
gimp-print.sourceforge.net for details).  It's an infrastructure-type
project -- providing print services for the Gimp.  I believe that a
royalty scheme would have a lot of effects, almost all undesirable:

1) Any time somebody submitted a patch, I would face a conflict of
   interest over whether to accept it -- accepting it might make it a
   better piece of software, but at a cost to my income, and the
   improvement in the software quality might not be enough to offset
   the reduction in royalty fraction.

2) Coders would have a great incentive to pad out their code to as
   great a degree as possible.  There would be no good reason to write
   terse yet readable code; the financial incentives would encourage
   writing code as verbose as possible (assuming that lines of code is
   used as a metric).  That's not hard to do by a variety of means:
   use excessively long variable names to force code to wrap over
   (relatively innocuous), write frequently-used code snippets out in
   longhand rather than encapsulated as procedures that are called
   (harmful), use very complex algorithms rather than simple, elegant
   ones (really pernicious).

3) People would lobby hard to have their code included in projects,
   rather than the code deemed to be best by the maintainer and/or the
   rest of the project team.  In the interests of equity, maintainers
   would be pressured to include code by certain people (Tom's having
   trouble paying the rent this month...please include his code so he
   gets paid), and other people who are simply better politicians
   would now have a stronger motivation to deploy their political
   skills.

4) People do open source projects for a variety of reasons.  In some
   cases, people explicitly want to get out of the rat race or may
   have non- or anti-capitalist motivation.  Must everyone be forced
   into an explicitly capitalist model even if that isn't their
   motivation?

5) Large and medium corporations and governments would have
   considerable incentive to avoid open source software, or at best
   (?) would prefer "their" open source software, based on motives
   other than what best meets their needs.

I don't want to be a "new nobility" at all.  I like developing
software, but I don't like the sound of "nobility".  A pure
meritocracy, like a pure just about any political system, tends to be
harmful in its own way.

My only comment about "capitalism works best..." is that capitalism !=
free market.  Capitalists seem to thrive on certain government-imposed
restrictions on the free market (patents, copyrights, laws restricting
competition), and try to impose their own restrictions (gain enough
market share to permit rigging the market against competitors,
restricting information available to customers to prevent them from
making fully informed decisions, and so forth).

I certainly don't object to developers being paid, but I don't think
that a piecework model applies very well to software.  Lines of code
are not fungible in the way that sweaters are.  But that's not even my
most serious objection -- the real core (as John Abreau notes in his
reply to this piece) is that this proposal essentially suggests
eliminating free software, and indeed the concept of community where
everyone shares in the outcome, altogether.

It doesn't bother me one bit that Red Hat, SuSE, VA, Epson, HP, Canon,
et al. will be the immediate beneficiaries if our gimp-print project
does well (I cite the printer companies because they'll presumably be
able to sell more printers with good Linux support).  I'll also
benefit, in the form of having better print quality myself, and from
the code in the project donated by other people.  Not to mention that
I learn new skills from doing this.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net
Project lead for The Gimp Print --  http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton
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