Re: Discussing issues

On Mon, 21 Apr 2003, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

>Rich Murphey wrote:
>>>And what I mean by my comment is slightly different. XFree86 
>>>consists of a lot of people who are working on XFree86 for 
>>>their own personal gain, for the gain of their company, or 
>>>for other similar reasons, not just out of random charity. 
>>>XFree86 works rather better for that I suspect than if it didn't.
>> 
>> Who works on XFree86 for their personal gain, or company gain?
>
>I do.  Contributing patches to XFree86 to make changes Sun has made in
>our Xserver keeps our code closer to XFree86, reducing the cost of
>merging XFree86 changes back into our servers, and allowing us to
>benefit from the bug fixing & feature enhancements made in XFree86
>for much less than doing the work ourselves.  (In Sun's case, we're
>just getting started here, but pretty much every Linux vendor has
>been doing exactly the same thing, getting the same benefits, for
>years.  After all, that's pretty much the main business case for
>any commercial vendor participation in any open source project.)

Indeed.

>The question here shouldn't really be who has vested interests,
>as others have pointed out, many people do, and it's a good thing,
>since it helps motivate them to contribute to XFree86.  (I know I
>wouldn't be able to spend as much time on it if my managers didn't
>consider it in Sun's best interest to have me spend part of the
>time they pay me for to work on it.)  The concern with vested
>interests is how much influence they have on people's decisions
>regarding the project, and whether or not they would cause someone
>to make a decision that benefits their vested interests but is
>detrimental to the project as a whole.  So far, I've seen nothing
>to indicate that has happened or is in danger of happening.

I think you pretty much have hit the nail on the head quite
eloquently here Alan.  The more contributors to a given project 
there are, the less likelyhood of any bad influence having any 
effect.  The beauty of open source is that it would be relatively 
difficult from any bad influence to have noticeable control as 
the greater community, and the people responsible for a given 
project wouldn't allow it to happen.

Open source IMHO guarantees that the best interests of a project,
and the larger community keep it free of these types of problems.


-- 
Mike A. Harris