https://lwn.net/Articles/959069/
"The free-software community has managed to build a body of software that is
worth, by most estimates, many billions of dollars; all of this code is freely
available to anybody who wants to use or modify it. It is an unparalleled
example of independent actors working cooperatively on a common resource. Free
software is certainly a success story, but all is not perfect. One of the
community's greatest strengths — convincing companies to contribute to this
common resource — is also part of one of its biggest weaknesses.
The GNU project, as described by Richard Stallman in the 1985 GNU Manifesto,
looked hopelessly ambitious at the time. To many of us, it seemed that only
large companies could build operating systems, and that a group of volunteers
would never be able to aspire to such a goal. The volunteers got surprisingly
far, to the point that, less than ten years after the GNU Manifesto was
published, running a system on only free software (or something close to that)
was possible. It was an impressive achievement.
Even then, though, that software not entirely devoid of corporate
contributions. The X Window System, for example, was the product of a
commercial consortium that predated Linux. The development of GCC was pushed
forward by companies like Cygnus Computing. When the Linux kernel arrived on
the scene, there was indeed a substantial body of GNU software that could run
on it, but there was a nontrivial amount of company-contributed software as
well.
Linux in the 1990s still lagged far behind the proprietary Unix systems in many
ways, even though it was better in others. That began to change with the
arrival of corporate funding, which supercharged development on Linux and on
free software in general. Without it, we would not have the system we take for
granted today. Companies, working in their own interest, have built up our body
of free software hugely; it is almost as if this capitalism thing actually
works.
The problem, of course, is that these companies have a tendency to interpret
their own self-interest rather narrowly. They will happily pay to develop a
driver for a hardware product, but they are less interested in supporting the
maintainership and review that are needed to integrate that driver, the
development of the subsystem into which the driver fits, or the support the
driver will need over the years. Companies pay for thousands of developers to
work on the kernel, but none pays for a single technical writer to create
documentation. Work that is not seen as contributing to short-term revenue
tends not to get much attention in the corporate world.
There are, needless to say, numerous other pathologies exhibited by
corporations in the open-source community. These include license violations,
free-riding, throwing code over the wall, and more. Projects that are
controlled by a single company are often particularly problematic. These
difficulties have often been covered elsewhere; today the focus is on the
failure to support parts of the community that we all depend on."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
