Andrew Stopford's Weblog

Just a general question, not a flame etc.: why would a commercial company give you their work for free while others have to pay for these same licenses?

Are you also asking your local supermarket to give you their groceries because you have no source of income because you give your work away for free?

If such a company isn't willing to give you their work for free, why do they then get slammed on your blog because of it?

This is what Open source is about: if you spend all your time on a given project P, and P is given away for free, then you have to make sure you have other sources of income so you can still pay the bills and thus make P.

You now hit that hard wall. However, there are other solutions. Tigris.org for example is the home of a lot of open source projects and they provide services for you. You can also try to get your work on codeplex, I'm sure MS will accept you. And there's also still sourceforge. YES it might suck in some ways, but I think you shouldn't complain in that sense: you also don't pay a dime for the service. Sure, they could have done a better job writing the same code, but that's about what you can argue about sourceforge.

(before you kill me off as stupid, I have released a lot of open source in the past decade, so I know what I'm talking about. )

I agree with Frans to be honest. Maybe a discount would be nice, but they still have to pay their bills at the end of the day.

I've actually paid for Frans' software that I'm using to build an open source piece of software, because in the end it'll actually save me hours. Although that software is a fixed cost, rather than a recurring cost.

I'm sorta hoping I'll get enough back in donations eventually to pay for my investment, but I'm not that bothered if I don't.

I can completely understand where you are coming from.  You're supporting an OSS project and you'd like some companies to support you with their software.  Never hurts to try, right?

Since 37signals won't offer a discount, have you considered asking your users to help support the costs of Basecamp for you?  I'm sure you'll get some folks willing to donate money to support your costs.

Andrew try telling that to the DotNetNuke people, or Red Hat, JBoss...you get the picture.

For more on DNN's recent manueverings see John Mitchell's blog here http://blogs.snapsis.com/PermaLink,guid,f7cd028a-a5bb-45f4-8dbb-23fbbf7a5d18.aspx

Have you looked at Zoho project? From their home page.

"Zoho Projects is 100% free for open-source projects.

To get an unlimited account for your open-source project contact our support."

Might be worth looking into. I've used their Writer and Spreadsheet products before and they are excellent.

Thousands of entrepreneurs build new start-ups every month and quite a few of them make tons of money in the end leveraging free and open source software created by enthusiasts.

There are tons and tons of greedy people who do nothing but sit and observe the open source community looking for free *** they can make money of.

37signals themselves used all that good and free stuff like Ruby and MySql to build BaseCamp.

This is why I find it sick when I see some people's comments about "why would a commercial company give anything for free..." In my opinion commercial companies owe big time to OSS folks.

1.  Non-profit does not mean no-revenue.  It just means that after all the bills are paid that revenue equals (hopefully) expenses.

2.  As I am sure Andrew recognizes, there are lots of expenses associated with developing Open Source software.  You can get a lot of goods and services donated which keeps costs down, but rarely are these goodwill gestures sufficient to eliminate costs completely.  As such, OS projects naturally seek to minimize costs for support software/hardware/bandwidth etc, so that they can use their limited hard currency for those items that really do require cash.

3.  While DotNetNuke has recently gone through a re-org, this is nothing new for any organization of any significant size.  You try to let people leave a project with a bit of dignity and without trashing their reputation, but sometimes people would rather stir up trouble than just accept that they no longer are a good fit for a project.

4.  Commercial projects don't owe OSS folks anything.  If you are doing OSS because you think you are owed something, then you probably are not working in the spirit of OSS.  We give away DotNetNuke with no anticipation of getting anything in return.  We have companies and individual who turn around and sell our software for thousands of dollars to their clients, and yet I still don't expect anything from them.  I know that in the aggregate that we are well compensated for the work we do.  Some of it is in the form of project support, some comes in the form of volunteer support, and some comes in the form of professional reputation, resume enhancement and public recognition.  Everyone who works on OSS projects is compensated exactly what their contribution is worth:  which is to say if they were not adequately compensated, they would no longer continue donating their time.

I totally understand Andrew's dissapointment at not having 37Signals provide a little more support to the OSS community, but I do have to say that they already provide quite a bit through their development and support of the RoR framework.  I have just finished reading about the development of Basecamp in the recent book "Founders at Work".  Given the ammount of code involved, it should not be that hard to create a reasonable replacement.  Personally, I used the software in the past and don't see what all the excitement is about since I found it to be extremely limiting: but to each his own.

I totally understand (and share) Andrew's thoughts, but also agree with Joe Brinkman. I just think Atlassian, JetBrains, Cenqua are great OSS supporter, mostly because they use OSS and believe in it.

A wild thought now: would have 37signals behave differently if it was a Ruby project?

I can see you point Andy -- but where would it stop?  Hospitals are much more deserving than OSS.. so should they get it for free too. What about charities. Companies that make Carbon neutral products?  

Good points, all.  

There are enough free homes for OSS project management that calling out Basecamp for not being one of them is not a productive avenue of exploration.  

37Signals already contributed Ruby on Rails to the world, they've done enough for OSS. :)

Check out http://www.activecollab.com/. It's a basecamp clone written in Php 5. I wish there was a similar open source project in ASP.NET.

To Joe Brinkman : It is ok to re organize DotNetNuke but why ask people to lie about their retirement reason:

"This will be easy for others to understand and support and helps us all to continue to work together harmoniously in a community we all wish to see growing."

What would it be easy for me to understand that John Mitchell retired from DotNetNuke willingly, as it is not true.

The spirit of OSS should be done without expectations of others.  Do OSS because you believe in it, and you are happy to provide it to the entire internet community without biases.

If you have expectations of others, then make a custom license... or require that your software can only be used in completely free software, and can not be shared (or copy and pasted into other projects, with licenses and credit attached of course).  So other OSS software such as Ruby can decide not to utilize your code, since they want to allow Ruby be used by commercial, and non OSS projects too.

To complete your project it would be nice for basecamp to donate to help you with your cause, it would also be nice for your internet provider to donate, and your electricity company to donate for your usage while building OSS, and the petrol company to donate, when you go to meet your OSS project developer team.

Basecamp will consider donating when it's good marketing and PR, which could generate them more profits... they need to do the ROI on that one, if they haven't already done so.  Perhaps if you can convince them the marketing+PR buzz from donating and becoming a sponsor of your project is worth the costs they might work with you.

Good luck!

MbUnit rawks!

Raj.

www.message_boricnoalba.com