[TallGuyShort]

On the other hand, what's the average ROI on investing in proprietary software development? It's rarely a question of spending the resources on software development, it's do we spend the resources in an open, or closed way? Nice to see a positive ROI, though - there's definitely a fear that it's just "giving stuff away" and clearly it's not that simple.

I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on how companies should do it because it's good for them financially (although granted that's probably more effective with the intended audience than what I would say). I wish a bigger deal was made about how it's just a douche bag move to sell software and proactively prevent users from having freedom to understand, fix or modify it for their needs - that applies to more than just the source availability and license.

[dqv]

>it's just a douche bag move to sell software and proactively prevent users from having freedom to understand, fix or modify it for their needs

I work in an industry that has a particularly nasty case of vendor lock-in. There are only a few vendors and they all do things the same way: no API and no innovation.

They are causing things to stagnate for the whole industry. I don't get why they don't realize that even just having an API (not even open source!) would lock someone in way tighter than any crappy gimmick feature.

I see open source as a regulator - a reference point that signals to closed vendors that they had better keep innovating or people will jump ship. When it's not there, it makes the vendors slow down since they know they can play it safe with the barriers for migration.

[harrisi]

Do you mind saying what industry you're referencing?

[dqv]

Right now I can't :(. I can't risk the potential retaliation from my current vendor.

[ftlio]

> I'm all about open-source, but I wish people wouldn't focus on how companies should do it because it's good for them financially

1) Why on Earth would a company spend a considerable amount of resources on doing something that isn't good for them financially? That's their thing, and in the whole scheme of things seems like good separation of concerns. Companies make profits. Other things do other things.

2) Figuring out how to measure the productivity of an open source project from a single perspective is a positive thing. We know that the externalities of the large profile, well-funded, open source projects feed back into their participating parties positively, from those funding them to those participating out of pure interest. Some of the big companies can even account for this in some way, but we also know that it's hard to fully account for the benefit.

One explanation for why a company might fund open source, given to me by someone working for Microsoft to the end of funding open source projects, is that open source generates the highest degree of reusable code. My guess is that allowing disparate interests to define a thing will net you a more nuanced definition than otherwise. Time preference will always be a thing though. Often you need to be fast more than you need to be correct.

[TallGuyShort]

Yeah I phrased that poorly. I think open-source is good for companies financially because it makes a more valuable product for end-users. And I wish THAT was the focus. What is typically the focus (although admittedly, is not really the focus in this article) in presentations trying to get companies to do open-source is, "look - people will do a bunch of free work for you". I think that's both unlikely and beside the point. I didn't mean to say that the fact that there IS a financial ROI should be irrelevant or a negative.

For instance: I gladly pay more for a book directly from O'Reilly because they don't have DRM on their ebooks. It's not that they're getting any direct freebies or savings from not doing DRM, it's that I look at the freer-as-in-libre product and think it's just a more valuable thing for me to buy. Same with software.

[pythonaut_16]

Many more enterprisey, open-source averse companies still seem to have a woeful lack of understanding of what open source actually is.

Just yesterday I heard someone saying a down side of open source is that you're relying on people's (contributor's) free time for any feature to get done. He somehow overlooked the fact that the largest and most popular open source projects tend to have full time paid contributors (often at Microsoft or Google), or in other cases have an active community with a far better delivery record than just about any enterprise software team.

[ftlio]

That makes much more sense.

[amorphid]

One thing I've noticed is I am actually less interested in writing software that should be open source, but isn't. The kind of stuff where we'd never sell it, no one would ever buy it, yet my current employer paid me to write it, and the next employer will pay me to write it again. Solving a problem the first time is almost always interesting. Grinding through it again is less interesting, especially if it's hard to remember how I did it the first time. I always enjoy coding, but I try not to build the same thing twice, at least not in the same language.

[justforFranz]

ROI for whom?!? Who is investing money here? Who is reaping the rewards of investment? Yeah, no shit getting people to work for free has a high ROI. What the heck?

[TallGuyShort]

What open source projects do you know where there's a significant portion of the work being done for free and a corporation reaping significant rewards? I mean if you look at the Linux and Hadoop ecosystems, the most successful companies dump significant money into contributing to all sorts of projects. And most of the significant contributors I know are professional. You do see more involved bug reports from users and more student projects, but it's a minority of the work, and I'd argue they're reaping some good benefits from the community themselves. Mozilla is a community I've known several work-for-free contributors in, but Mozilla's not exactly raking in cash and flying their executives to exotic destinations in private jets all the time as far as I know.

My point above is precisely that I see open-source pitched to companies as "look you can get the community working for you" but I think that's (a) missing the point of free software, and (b) probably not happening much. Dumping stuff on Github might get some pull requests generated, but you don't get a functioning community without investing heavily in it yourself. Companies that don't really invest in open source generally have ghost-town communities and aren't well equipped to harness the power of those pull requests to begin with - it goes both ways.

[seanhandley]

A huge number of open source contributors do so on company time (with the blessing of their employer). It certainly isn't "for free".

[pirocks]

n00b here. Can someone explain to me how this works. I imagine a good developer is fairly expensive, so letting them do something unrelated to there job must be pretty expensive. How does this make business sense?

[TallGuyShort]

Quite often the company's product is the open source project. It's just that instead of selling licenses, they're selling support contracts. You could get the software free, but for a fee you get to call the engineer that built it in the middle of the night for help keeping it running. And as a bonus, you get to leverage their ability to drive the roadmap when you have feature requests.

So really the debate here is not "do you hire an engineer full time or not?" it's "do you allow the output of that engineer to be open source or not?"

There's also a perk for the engineer: they work on stuff they can publicly point to as their portfolio full-time. Want to see me code? I don't necessarily have to have a bunch of side-projects on Github. Go check out the JIRA for these huge features I worked on!

[watwut]

1.) The task usually needs to be done, but is not business advantage. E.g. you wont sell more because of it. The developer asks the company whether the thing can be released and company does not care so it says ok.

2.) The developer has high status in the company and thus can do what he wish (up to the point). The company ends up tolerating it.

[dgacmu]

In addition to the other answers you've gotten, it's often the case that: (a) Developing what you need as a modest extension to existing OSS is cheaper than doing it all by yourself; and (b) Contributing those changes back to the community means that you've shed the burden of having to keep your local patch's changes in sync with the OSS version going forward.

("Hey, we wanted to use MAAS to maintain our cluster, but it doesn't support our particular power controller, so let's send the patch upstream...")

[claudiulodro]

It's generally a technology somewhat related to your job.

For example, web hosts like GoDaddy do a fair amount of contribution to WordPress because they host a lot of WordPress sites and their customers will keep renewing their web hosting if WordPress is excellent and secure.

[maxxxxx]

I wonder what the percentage of Linux kernel devs who are paid for doing it versus the ones that do it on the side. I bet the paid percentage is higher.