First bollocks of JavaOne
May 8th, 2007 by HenRich Green is talking bollocks about paying open source developers.
The article also says: “The current scenario is Robin Hood backwards: stealing from the poor and making others rich, said Green. He stressed that Sun, however, is the number-one contributor to open source worldwide.”
- a) Open source developers are not poor.
- b) I’m no expert, but I’m reading a book about a man who is (Forty Signs of Rain) and in it he discusses game theory and how the best approach is generosity with random acts of non-generosity to punish people who are selfish. I’ve no idea if that’s true (and it’s in the context of driving), but it does seem to map nicely to open source.
- c) Dumping code on open source is not a contribution. If we remove all the ‘open source’ code that was originally developed as a proprietary product, I wonder who the real number-one contributor becomes. I suspect the individual victims of Green’s Robin Hood scenario.
- d) Many of us do open source specifically because commercial environments are not giving us the things we want. The ‘worrisome social artifact’ of companies looking to dominate open source more and more is a ‘worrisome scenario and not sustainable’ to us. ‘We’ are starting to talk quite a lot about the corporatizing of open source.
- e) Kudos to all the open source developers out there (including many at Sun) who manage to remain individuals rather than being borged by their employer’s open source strategizing.
May 8th, 2007 at 9:31 am
To be fair, RMS gave Sun that talking point, and it’s based on nothing other than the FSF wanting to be able to point to Sun as a shining example.
By far the largest “contribution” Sun has made is the GPL’ed JDK. Which, by the way, we’re still waiting on the remainder of, and which was promised to us by middle of the year.