Re: Funding software development?

On Wed, 5 Jun 2002, Francois Gouget wrote:

> This will not happen. The vast majority of software will never be made
> public, much less GPLed. This is software which contains trade secrets.
> For instance a bank would never reveal how it computes the credit rating
> of its clients. Military would never make public the guidance software
> for their missiles. Companies, big and small, will want to keep some
> software seret, and will also need custom software.

Certainly there would always be some enclaves of secret code, but maybe 
less than you think.  The Navy has already built at least one "smart" ship 
(that ironically ended up dead in the water) based on Windows NT.  This is 
a military vessel under control of proprietary, commercial software -- is 
it such a stretch to imagine that someday missile guidance software could 
indeed be placed under control of proprietary GPL software?  Congress could 
enact a law to require it.

You can't assume that external forces will necessarily prevent the GPL from 
ever achieving dominance.

> There is room for all licenses, proprietary, *GPL, and *BSD. I don't see
> how any of them can 'take over the world' and drive all others to
> extinction.

It's not necessary to drive other licenses and truly free software to 
extinction.  It's only necessary to drive them to irrelevance.  That's a 
very different matter.

> With regard to the perenity of 'programmer' as a job, I am more worried
> about either the death of Moore's law, or about 'artificial
> intelligence' making programmers irrelevant, or at least transforming
> our job so much that our current experience will be worthless, just like
> it happened to telephone operators.

Hey, it could happen.  But that's natural evolution.  The GPL isn't.  It's 
one thing if the march of time dictates that we should become irrelevant.  
It's quite another if we unwittingly do it to ourselves.

> And as you yourself pointed out this is similar to what Transgaming has
> done... not to their customers but to the Wine community. And eventhough
> I believe they did not do it intentionally, they get criticized, and
> rightly so.

Rightly so?  Is it really Transgaming's fault if the users aren't willing 
to support development?  They offered a deal -- support us, and we'll make 
some cool stuff for Wine to run games better.  They even went out on a limb 
by starting to write the code BEFORE getting that community support -- this 
alone could be seen as a significant gesture of good faith.  Then, when the 
community has failed to meet its end of the bargain, it turns on them for 
"betraying" the community?  Can you not see the irony here?

From what I've seen, it appears that if anyone has the right to be bitter, 
it's Transgaming and its too-few subscribers, not the whole Wine community.

> > As for the InstallShield issues, I don't see any indication that TG ever
> > indicated that they would release any work in this area just because they
> > were aided by others in the Wine project.
> 
> The way I read their original statement is that they would keep the
> Direct3D code until their subscription quota was met but that the rest
> of the code, e.g. COM, would be returned to Wine. Yes it is now obvious
> that we (Me, CodeWeavers and the Wine community) were naive but then we
> (the Wine community) learnt and switched to the LGPL.

So it's Transgaming's fault that you misread their statement?  The original 
statement I read seemed quite straightforward and reasonable.  While they 
were offering some code now, they were holding the rest back under the AFPL 
until the community steps up to support their business model.

Now, until that happened (and evidently it never has), there was no reason 
to assume that they would be giving back new code yet.  You jumped to an 
unwarranted conclusion, and want to blame them for it?  That's your fault.

If their business model fails, so be it.  However, it's one of those models 
that sounds great on paper, which Open Source advocates have encouraged 
companies to pursue.  Now, a company tries to pursue it, and gets attacked 
by the community in the end.  Why?  Because not enough people wanted to 
support the model to make it viable.  Yet, despite this lack of support 
from the community, the community nevertheless demands that Transgaming 
should still follow through on their end of a bargain never executed?

With results like this, why should any company believe these optimistic 
predictions about how great these proposed business models ought to work?  
In practice, one business model after another has failed, because the users 
just want "free beer".  Why should the NEXT company go out on a limb like 
Transgaming did here?  Obviously they can't count on community support, or 
even sympathy for the failure of a recommended business model!

> When you are dealing with volunteers, and any open-source project does,
> if the journey is not enjoyable nobody will want to go through it and
> you will get nowhere. Thus, if you want to reach your goal in an
> open-source project, the journey has to be enjoyable.

This is certainly true when the project depends entirely on volunteers, 
unless those volunteers are so invested in seeing the results that they'll 
endure unenjoyable work to achieve them...

> This is actually even true for non open-source projects and work in
> companies. If the pay is bad, your boss is a jerk, and rivalries run
> deep in the company, then you will quickly jump ship in disgust. Even if
> you care about what the company is doing (unless you are in a situation
> where there is no greener pasture for you).

It's all relative.  Certainly everyone has limits.

> For open-source projects the risk of seeing volunteers jump ship is even
> higher since it is very easy for them to do so, and since they can even
> simply fork the project so that they get to run it the way they want and
> still work towards the same goal.

The peoblem is that there's no good way to fund open-source development 
because of the "free beer" aspect and its effects.  Transgaming has been 
burned by trying to do it, and now they seem to be shifting gears to try a 
different business model, since the "Street Performer Protocol" failed so 
miserably.  While projects can make progress with volunteer lable, fickle 
though it may be, they can make much faster progress with proper funding to 
keep the developers from having to work a "day job" and sacrifice their 
free time to the volunteer duties...

Deven