27
Quite an open-source religious war has flared up here! A question that might clarify some issues: what actually is the "open source philosophy?" Who is the arbiter of what is OSS philosophy and what isn't?
Richard Stallman?
The GPL is only one open-source license. There are many others, some very similar and some not. I believe the common thread is that they all mandate that source code be made available as part of any distribution.
Andy, it sounds to me like you're saying something like this: because the GPL says that you must release code *if* you distribute, then therefore you *must* distribute when you have GPL code. And anything short of that is just plain wrong.
Even the Free Software Foundation itself has the LGPL, which recognizes the incentives for development (ie: money) that can arise from allowing inclusion of closed source software in an otherwise open source distribution.
I think ransomware is a very interesting approach to funding software development, and to turn up your nose at it because it is somehow philosophically impure seems like a very dogmatic thing to do. The GPL does not tell you when to release, it just says that if you share, then you allow others to share and share alike. How is ransoming code in defiance of that?
We too believe in giving away modules and code in order to benefit the community and make XOOPS a more attractive and better product, but there are a ton of competing interests here to balance.
The biggest is, of course, that the development work has to be paid for somehow. Andy, did you finance the thousands of dollars it cost to develop your modules through a bank loan? Or did a client actually pay you to complete that work? If a client is paying, then there's other issues on the table...
In our case, clients pay for particular work; we don't work unless someone pays. Not all clients would be especially happy if the work they are funding were instantly turned around and handed out to everyone in the world, including perhaps competing organizations. The key thing is timing. We think that paying for the development effort should entitle the client to some extra benefit that others don't have, to help create an incentive for people to pay for development.
Because if you just release everything you develop, as you develop it, then you have a serious "free rider" problem: If one client pays thousands toward development of a particular feature or module, and then the next client gets it for free just because someone else asked for it first, then that's a huge dis-incentive for anyone to be an originator. It gives everyone a big reason to just wait until either they absolutely need something immediately, or someone else has already paid for it.
To combat that, we don't immediately release all code, until it has reached a properly tested, bug free, feature complete stage. Clients that are paying typically want the first version that will work, and that version is not released, and anyone else who wants that version can contribute to the development, and the code is released publically when the development is "done."
(Is that much different from the WF-Projects team waiting until a module is well tested, etc, before release?)
I think the essense of "open source philosophy" is that you give away the source, that is is available. I don't think OSS developers should be derriding each other because they have different ideas about when to release, or how to finance their development efforts.
(This is the kind of thread that people laugh about when they talk about those crazy open-source developers! How can they get anything done when they're busy arguing about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin!)
--Julian
