Whither open source in the land of leeches?

IBM's Savio Rodrigues sees a lot of benefits from proprietary technology companies like Cisco "leeching" off open-source communities to boost profits and drive top-line revenue growth. I'm inclined to agree, at least with his assessment of IBM's involvement in open source.

IBM, however, may be the exception to the rule. Savio is quick to stress that IBM, at least in the case of the Apache HTTP Server, was not merely a parasite, but also contributed significant resources to sustaining and improving the Apache code. IBM, in this way, has been a model open-source citizen.

Other proprietary vendors are less salutary to the open-source communities from which they "borrow." Dave Roberts of Vyatta, an open-source competitor to Cisco, takes a swipe at the networking giant for "reducing costs with open source [and] pocketing profits," but contributing little to nothing back. I'm sympathetic to this view, as I've written before, particularly with reference to the Web 2.0 companies that derive huge benefits from open source and contribute virtually nothing back.

Fair game? Well, as a free-market liberal (in the classical sense), I'm all for companies using all legal and ethical means to boost profits and revenue. But I do worry that some short-sighted "profit taking" by proprietary (and open-source) vendors may leave us with a non-renewable open-source resource.

But maybe the market is self-correcting. Meaning, maybe if Cisco is, in fact, taking without giving, it will eventually "deforest" open source to the extent that it will hurt its profits, which will lead it to contribute back as a means of self-preservation.

If we get to that point, open source should boom, with rising number of contributions made to serve long-term strategic interests in low-cost complements.

[deepwave]

Open source unfortunately has to deal with the "tragedy of the commons" problems. I believe that you mentioned that before. I'm starting to think that in the long term, the only sustainable open source projects will either have a main corporate sponsor (like Qt) or a foundation/consortium (Mozilla) associated with them.

[fazalmajid]

Maintaining an internal fork of open-source software is very costly. Most companies that modify open-source software will prefer to contribute patches back if only to reduce the burden of configuration management overhead.

[Savio.Rodrigues]

Hi Matt,<br /><br />&gt;Savio is quick to stress that IBM, at least in the case of the Apache HTTP Server, was not merely a parasite, but also contributed significant resources to sustaining and improving the Apache code. IBM, in this way, has been a model open-source citizen.<br /><br />I am also quick to stress that this is a mode we use with *many* open source components that are used within IBM products. :-)<br /><br />For example, OpenJPA, Apache Tuscany, Eclipse, are but the few that come to mind. When we chose to use a component within an IBM product we want to ensure that we can provide bug fixes and enhancements to the open source component in question. What better way to do so than ensure that we have IBMer who contribute to these projects as part of their IBM role.

[admoore]

Seems to me this is what the idea of copyleft was designed to deal with. If you're dealing with GPL or other copyleft code, you will eventually have to contribute changes back if you're distributing modified code. If your have a product based around GPL code, you're eventually going to want to modify that code to fix defects or add features.<br /><br />If you've got projects under a BSD/MIT style license, that's your choice; but complaining about companies not "giving back" seems kind of pointless. If you think there should be an obligation to give back, then put it in the license. <br /><br />It's like people who make "donationware" and then complain when nobody donates. If you want to sell software, sell it. If you want to give it away, don't expect anyone to pay you for it.

[Dox96]

I think this concept of "leeching" off open source is overblown. To me, by simply _using_ open source software, you are effectively contributing. Since I have started to use Linux on my home computer, I haven't donated a single line of code, but I have asked questions on forums, leaving answers for everyone to find on the web, and I have sent kernel oopses back via the automatic feature allowing this in Fedora. Are these not "contributions"?<br /><br />In the case of Cisco, I think it is inevitable that they will have to contribute actual code in the end sometime in the future. They'll have no choice. They'll find that to advance their own products, they'll need features that aren't already there, forcing them to start programming. Of course, they could always keep that code in-house, but they will find themselves outflanked by companies that contribute back because others will make contributions to any new features that they bring out. No one else can contribute to your own feature if you keep it in-house.<br /><br />When you add to the fact that Cisco engineers are building up valuable experience in using open source software and their exposure to the community, to me, it's a matter of when, not if, Cisco starts contributing.<br /><br />So stop complaining about them! Celebrate that they're actually using it in the first place!