Is It Good For Business To Subsidize OSS Developers?

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.

The French seems to be leading the US these days

[Anonymous Coward]

From FOSS, to nuclear power.

Re:evidence free

[Yetihehe]

Spip. One of the worst cms out there. And all it's code is in french, so nobody else outside France can make too much of it.

Re:Collective action problem

[Just Some Guy]

Why would a business pay for software that benefits everybody else? Why not just wait for someone else to do it?

To scratch an itch. My company needed a fast way to convert FoxPro files to PostgreSQL [honeypot.net], so I wrote one. Now, we're not in the database format conversion business, so this isn't something our competitors would be waiting to pounce on. Why on Earth would we want to keep it locked up? I've already gotten bug reports and feature requests that made it work better for us, so we actually came out ahead by giving it away.

Honestly, especially for projects outside a company's direct business plan, I can't think of a single reason not to subsidize FOSS. You needed it and were going to write it anyway, right?

Re:evidence free

[TheRaven64]

Free.fr, a French ISP, is a big supporter of Free Software. They host a lot of the FSF sites and also GNA.org, for non-GNU projects (we use them). You may have noticed some other projects developed by French people and hosted on free.fr. The ones that spring immediately to mind are FFMPEG, VLC, and QEMU.

Re:evidence free

[Anonymous Coward]

Free.fr actually ships you a minimalistic linux box as modem; it streams the VOD through vlc, can record shows on it's hdd, and they even encourage you to hack it. I'd say that's pretty awesome, even without comparing prices or snooping practices with US ISPs...

Yes - but give an incentive

[kubitus]

If a company like M$ destroys your market - you destroy theirs by offering their product for free. As this is not legal, you support somebody else who does. Economics of supporting FOSS explained in a capitalist market! Second: I would love to see a modified GPL which limits the use of SW it covers to non-commercial use but allows companies who contribute ( according to some key/function etc..) to include it in their products/use it for their commercial purposes.