Reading 08: Funding the Magic Cauldron

I’m not sure open source ever made business sense, at least from the perspective of the “developer pool”. In The Magic Cauldron, ESR seems to smooth over the financial structure of supporting a large developer pool which makes the open source model of massively peer-reviewed code. I would argue, and I think ESR would agree based on his discussion of hacker motivations in Homesteading the Noosphere, that developers do not contribute to open source with any care or expectation of business success. They just want things that work. And occasionally, this can be ruinous if financial stability was not an inherent part of their life before getting deeply involved in open source development. We talked about this at the beginning of the semester with the management uncertainties of Void Linux.

In fact, I think ESR’s discussion focuses too much on the business success of projects rather than developers. He casually notes that labs and companies are setting up dedicated open source labs for Rockstar open source developers to come work on those topics full time. This excuses the fact that there is a huge inequity in who has the privilege of a stable financial situation to support a life of intensive open source hacking. Walking out on a job to focus on starting your own business requires a significant level of financial stability beforehand, and still banks on long term payoffs from the business’s success. No one gets into open source expecting the same financial returns as a private start-up, and so giving the same level of dedication requires even more financial stability upfront. And we haven’t even begun to discuss the social toll of endeavoring to turn open source into a full-time job.

So, for companies or projects, open source makes perfect sense because there is an assumed massive developer pool that will always be available for free. I don’t think ESR does a good job of addressing how to support each of those developers in some way. Instead, he focuses on the success of a few privileged juggernauts to argue similar success is possible for anyone who roles up their sleeves and gets to homesteading.

I believe there exists an elegant solution to this problem which ESR undervalues as well as the problem we discussed in class and which ESR pointed out as bad form where companies take open source projects to support their for-profit products and then don’t contribute back. Tech companies should start incorporating open-source development into their developer’s billable hours. It’s not uncommon for flashy, cutting edge companies to allow their employees time to exercise on company time. This would be similar to that policy, but it also has the benefit of encouraging employees to enhance their development skills in the process. Plus, it gives back to the open source community by funding the ongoing massive peer-review process in a more stable and equitable way than it is currently happening. Additionally, if companies were apprehensive about this idea, they could still require any open source work done exist under a purely open source license, that way they could treat it as a kind of free side R&D department where any interesting work can be folded back into the company’s body of work.