Is It Good For Business To Subsidize OSS Developers? 124
ruphus13 writes "A lot of developers for open source software have full-time day jobs too. As economist Milton Friedman said, 'The business of business is business.' So, does it make sense for companies to encourage their developers to contribute to the open source community? OStatic discusses a blog post by Alfresco exec Matt Asay, who makes the case for why they should. '"Companies like IBM, Intel, SGI, MIPS, Freescale, HP, etc. are all working to ensure that Linux runs well on their hardware. That, in turn, makes their offerings more attractive to Linux users, resulting in increased sales." While I don't think we'll ever see companies everywhere subsidizing employee development of open source tools, many tech and non-tech companies alike could benefit from subsidizing open source development from employees with talent. If more companies woke up to this idea, we'd see more purpose-driven, mission-critical open source software shared by firms in the same industries. That, ultimately, would benefit the companies providing the subsidies.' Should your employer pay you for time spent on open source development?"
snydeq points out an Infoworld story suggesting that there's something to learn from the way French companies are promoting open-source development.
Re:evidence free (Score:3, Informative)
Re:evidence free (Score:1, Informative)
Well it's certainly being talked about:
here [techworld.com]
here [infoworld.com]
here [linux.com]
and here [edemocracy-forum.com]
Re:Why (Score:3, Informative)
True, but I can think of a reason why companies would want to subsidise OSS for their own selfish needs.
Currently I use some OSS software in my company, dragging my boss kicking and screaming and recently, begrudgingly agreeing that it was a better solution!. Now, there are features I'd like to add, improvements I'd like to make, additions I'd like to implement, but I don't really have the time at work or at home to do it. Persuade my boss that we could improve the OSS software and we would have a better system for our needs, and the OSS projects I use would gain from my work.
I don't think we'd ever directly pay for improvements we'd do it ourselves, but both ways amount to the same thing - subsidised OSS software, where everyone wins.
Re:Yes, but ... GPL (Score:4, Informative)
This means if the company donates two weeks of my time to subsidize this OSS project, it ends up losing ownership of the rest or our application.
No it doesn't. You (or your company) seem to be confusing copyright ownership with source code distribution. You don't relinquish copyright ownership of code you wrote by incorporating GPL'd code into your application, you're just required to make your source available if you're distributing it with the stuff you didn't write. Don't like it? Sorry, that's what the author of the code you got for and investment of $0 decided upon when they chose to distribute what they wrote --and own.
Yes: case study from Google / ZXing (Score:4, Informative)
I am from Google and co-operate the "zxing" open-source barcode reader project. (http://code.google.com/p/zxing) Two of us were allowed to devote most of our time for 6 months to this open project, because it made strategic sense for the business.
Why? To be brief, 2D barcodes open up new possibilities for advertising services in print. Our Print Ads business wanted to build services around them. However the market is still developing and while there are some dominant open standards evolving, there are several proprietary formats emerging. We thought it best -- both for the ecosystem but also for our business -- if the open standards won. So we explicitly set out to promote them, and one way of doing that is to release free, open, quality software that uses the open standards.
Contributing to open source can definitely be strategically valuable.