Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

Recent Blog Discussions of Open Source Donations, etc.

(1/3) > >>

mouser:
I absolutely love jeff atwood's Coding Horror blog, but found myself in rare disagreement with him this morning.
He posted some reflections on another blog entry by Scott Hanselman on the death of the open source project NDoc.


* View Scott Hanselman's Original Entry
* View Jeff Atwood's Blog Entry About It

Scott:
NDoc: The Death of a (great) Open Source Project

On a related note, it's going to take a while (6 months to a year?) for Microsoft to really get Sandcastle to the point where Kevin Downs got NDoc. Will this new tool be as rich and useful? Or will it be forgotten like HTML Help Workshop?

Recently Kevin Downs, the leader of NDoc, emailed a NDoc folks announcing that NDoc is dead. I was shocked to get this email, but sadly, not surprised. Here's an important part of his email:

Unfortunately, despite the almost ubiquitous use of NDoc, there has been no support for the project from the .Net developer community either financially or by development contributions. Since 1.3 was released, there have been the grand total of eleven donations to the project. In fact, were it not for Oleg Tkachenko’s kind donation of a MS MVP MSDN subscription, I would not even have a copy of VS2005 to work with!

To put this into perspective, if only roughly 1-in-10 of the those who downloaded NDoc had donated the minimum allowable amount of $5 then I could have worked on NDoc 2.0 full-time and it could have been released months ago! Now, I am not suggesting that this should have occurred, or that anyone owes me anything for the work I have done, rather I am trying to demonstrate that if the community values open-source projects then it should do *something* to support them. MS has for years acknowledged community contributions via the MVP program but there is absolutely no support for community projects.
...
For "base of the pyramid" fundamental stuff like Build, Test, Coverage, Docs, will we pay for them? We should. Should we have given the NDoc project $5? Did NDoc help me personally and my company? Totally. Did I donate? No, and that was a mistake. I agree with Phil. Support those 5, 10, 20 truly Open Source projects with a little of your time or money.

--- End quote ---



Jeff:
...
Open source software is at its best when you aren't obligated to do anything at all other than use it.
..
You definitely shouldn't have to pay for it.
...
Personally, as an Open Source project co-leader, I'd much rather folks who use DasBlog pick a bug and send me a patch (unified diff format) than give money. I suspect that Kevin would have been happy with a dozen engineers taking on tasks and taking on bugs in their spare time.
...
Contributing code to an open source project is a far greater extravagance than any monetary contribution could ever be. It's also infeasible for 99 percent of the audience-- those who have both the time and the ability-- which makes it an even more extravagant demand.
...
If contributing money is foolish and contributing code is an extravagance, what's a poor user to do? Nothing. Nothing at all, that is, other than use the software.
...
The highest compliment you can pay any piece of open source software is to simply use it, because it's worth using. The more you use it, the more that open source project becomes a part of the fabric of your life, your organization, and ultimately the world. Isn't that the greatest contribution of all?
--- End quote ---



I'm not quite sure where Jeff is coming from with his conclusion that "contribuing money is foolish".
Here is what i wrote in reply to Jeff:
i wrote about these issues in my article on donationware, "When Do Users Donate":
https://www.donationcoder.com/Articles/One/index.html

if you back up from your conclusion and simply ask yourself the question: "*IS* contributing money foolish" - i'm not sure youd often come up with an answer of yes. in fact you might come to the conclusion that donating $5 to an open source project you love, if many people did it, would enable a few developers to quit their day jobs and improve the quality, reliability, documentation, of the projects.

isn't it at least feasible that widespread acceptence of a donation-based approach to funding open source projects, if we all took it seriously, could make it possible for open source coders to spend more time polishing their software and working on some of the finishing touches that many of us bitch about (lack of docs, etc.)?
--- End quote ---

Your thoughts?

NeilS:
I think there's an element of truth in what Jeff is saying, but in typical Jeff style, he jumps pretty quickly to a set of conclusions that are likely to annoy some portion of his readers. I've found that most of the best writers/bloggers out there have similar tendencies. In fact, that's probably what makes them worth reading in the first place, but being worth reading and always being right aren't necessarily the same thing.

Jeff seems to be taking some kind of purist view of open source software, where the main aim is to get people using your software, with a secondary goal of getting some people to help make it. That's fine - it's a nice model and it works for a lot of people, but I must have skipped the section of the rulebook that says you can only do it that way.

If someone wants to start up an open source (or closed-source freeware) project on the basis that some people will donate to (or sponsor) the work, then that's their choice, and they should be free to make it. If someone does it this way because they can't get a critical mass of developers helping out on the project (and thus have to put in a significant amount of work or money themselves), then it's not even a choice - it's a neccessity.

It seems to me that there are lots of ways to make a software project sustainable, ranging from selling it like a normal product, right through to the lone freeware programmer who continues a project because he uses the software himself, or simply enjoys seeing other people benefit from his efforts. Different projects have different needs in this respect, as do the people who take part in them, so it simply doesn't make sense to have one definition for open source software which only supports a narrow range of "acceptable" sustainability methods.

I wonder if Jeff believes that the sponsorship given by large companies like HP, IBM and Novell to a number of open source projects is also wrong and, if so, does he believe that all of these projects would still exist without this sponsorship? Would he rather some projects died than having any money change hands? I don't think that's quite what he's trying to say, but it does seem to be heading in that direction.

BTW Mouser, your point about donations being used to encourage more effort on the less-enjoyable parts of software (like manuals) is a good one. I don't think "the purists" really have an answer for that one yet.


- Neil.

mouser:
nice take on it that i agree with:
http://haacked.com/archive/2006/08/02/OpenSourceIsFreeLikeAFlower.aspx

NeilS:
nice take on it that i agree with:
http://haacked.com/archive/2006/08/02/OpenSourceIsFreeLikeAFlower.aspx
-mouser (August 02, 2006, 01:56 PM)
--- End quote ---

Yeah, good article. If you extend his flower analogy to the concept of financial donations, it's a bit like someone on your street offering to build a nice flower garden that everyone can enjoy, and they'll keep it up as long as they can, but any donations will help to ensure that it keeps going as long as possible, and maybe even allow them to spend a bit more on fancier flowers. It's hard to imagine anyone getting annoyed at the person making this offer, but that seems to be exactly what's happening when people start talking about using donations to help sustain software projects.

Coming back to Jeff Atwood's blog, his main argument seems to be that, since contributing code is far more useful than money (which somehow means contributing money is foolish), and since most people can't contribute code, we shouldn't do either. But - surely - if people take a view that they "do what they can", then lots of people contributing a small amount of money each will help to encourage the small number of people who can contribute code to do so?

mouser:
well put NeilS.

Do what you can.

People can help projects in different ways, and to different degrees depending on their abilities, time, financial resources, etc.  There are lots of ways to help support a project, big and small.

Those of us who have been advocating for a donation based approach to funding are very keen on the idea of being flexible about letting users figure out for themselves how they can and want to contribute..

it's frustrating to hear someone say that its foolish to contribute to an open source project.  Different people can help in different ways - the central tennet of donationware advocates is to figure out a way to let people express their support and help a project in a way THEY choose to.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page