Economic motivation of open source software

Published on April 13, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

Have you ever wondered why companies like IBM tend to use open source in their solutions and even pay developers to write software that’s given away for free? An article by Dirk Riehle entitled The Economic Motivation of Open Source Software: Stakeholder Perspectives may answer some of your questions.

The article will be most interesting to those with a basic understanding of microeconomics (like the knowledge gained from Waterloo’s ECON 101). However, I’m sure you’ll still find it valuable if you’ve never seen a demand curve before. If you’re interested, you can read up on demand curves at Wikipedia’s page on supply and demand.

Complete video of Richard Stallman talk available

Published on April 13, 2007 in Open source. 1 Comment

I’ve updated the page containing pictures and videos from the Richard Stallman talk at UCSD, which was mentioned in a previous post, with a complete video of his talk, provided to me by UCSD. I would suggest skimming the index of interesting points in the video that I’ve added to the page to see if there is anything in the video that you’d like to watch.

Immigration, global warming, and capitalism

Published on April 5, 2007 in World issues. 0 Comments

I recently rented the Children of Men DVD, which contains a 27-minute extra called The Possibility of Hope. I highly recommend watching this extra. It brings to the surface many problems with the way industries and governments are moving forward, which we tend to ignore or never discuss.

The Possibility of Hope is available in 5 parts on YouTube (1 2 3 4 5) or in 1 part on Yahoo! Video. I’m not sure if the publisher of The Possibility of Hope approves of these distribution methods so if you’re concerned about that, definitely rent the Children of Men DVD.

Zero pollution car suitable for highways

Published on March 19, 2007 in Environment. 0 Comments

It looks like we’ll soon have a car that produces no pollution but doesn’t skimp on top speed or travel distance (see the gizmag article or the official web site for details). From what I’ve seen, cars that use alternative power sources such as electricity or solar energy have traditionally had low top speeds, making them suitable only for city driving, or short distances between recharges, making long road trips impossible. With a top speed of 68 mph and the ability to go 200 to 300 km between fill ups, the air car solves both problems.

The air car should soon be in the production phase and will apparently be available for US$7300. It’s also incredibly fuel (air?) efficient at US$3 a tank. I’m looking forward to seeing some of these on the road as the world finally starts realizing that gas-powered cars are no longer the most efficient vehicles on the road. Hopefully we’ll start seeing compressed air refill stations popping up soon.

Companies writing open source

Published on March 2, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I read an interesting article linked from Slashdot the other day entitled “Who wrote 2.6.20?“, which details the approximate percentage of code that people and companies had contributed to version 2.6.20 of the Linux kernel using various metrics based on lines of code (while this may not be a perfectly accurate representation of the amount of work that went into the contributions, it is at least an approximate measure).

I found it particularly interesting that over 65% of the code was contributed by companies (see the article for how this was measured), which shows that a lot of people are paid to write open source kernel code.

If you’re interested, as I am, in writing open source kernel code for a living, I would suggest checking out the companies that contributed a large percentage of code according to the article. Of course this should not be your only way of determining who to work for. I would also consider how much of this code is useful to the general public versus how much is specific to a certain piece of hardware that most people don’t use.

Richard Stallman talk at UCSD

Published on March 2, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I recently went to a talk by Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, at the University of California, San Diego. While I don’t necessarily endorse all of his views, I think he’s got a lot of good things to say. Stallman is a great example of a person who is not afraid to stand up for what he believes in.

You can view the pictures and video I took on the pictures/videos page and the notes I recorded on the notes page.

For those of you in the Waterloo area, you may be interested to know that Richard Stallman will be speaking at UW on April 11. For more details see the CS Club’s description of the talk or the FSF’s description.

Notes from SCALE talks

Published on March 1, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I’ve finally got around to typing up my notes from the talks at SCALE. Here they are for anyone who’s interested.

Some talks that I found particularly interesting:

I would highly recommend looking at all the talks to see if there’s a talk that’s particularly interesting for you.

Some open source programming job opportunities

Published on February 11, 2007 in Open source. 0 Comments

I was at The Fifth Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) yesterday and I ran across several companies that pay programmers to write open source software. Here’s a summary of the companies in no particular order:

  • Trixbox – produces open source management tools for the Asterisk PBX, which they pay their programmers to write; they sell support for the management tools, which includes the option to backup your config files to their servers in case your server goes down
  • Ingres – an open source database company that pays programmer to work on the database and gets money from businesses that wish to extend the database but want their changes supported
  • ClearHealth – writes open source web-based tools for hospitals and doctor’s offices to facilitate billing, scheduling etc.; sells support and assisted setup to these organizations
  • Coraid – makes NAS devices; wrote and currently maintain an ATA-over-Ethernet driver in the mainstream Linux kernel
  • ImageStream – makes Linux routers using their own hardware; they modify the kernel’s network layer and write drivers for their hardware that they open source
  • Zenoss – writes open source management tools for IT departments; sells support

I found it very encouraging to see that there are lots of companies out their that will pay programmers to write open source software and have found a business model that makes this sustainable. I think the above list shows that one’s dream to write open source software for a living can be a reality.

Open source: intro, jobs, and business models

Published on December 15, 2006 in Open source. 0 Comments

There are a bunch of topics I want to cover relating to open source in general, open source jobs, and business models based on open source, but I don’t have time to write about all of them now so I’m writing down the topics for your benefit (so you know what sorts of posts are coming up) and mine (so I don’t forget what I was going to write about).

I believe open source software improves the world as a whole, which is why I’m talking about it here. I’ll be expanding on my reasons in a future post. If you’re not familiar with open source, see Wikipedia. If I find a more concise page (and I’m sure one exists), I’ll add it. If you know of one, please add it in a comment.

The term “open sources jobs” is generally used to refer to jobs where open source software is used, but not necessarily written. From what I’ve seen in my web browsings, there appear to be three main categories:

  • Consulting – providing solutions that use open source software to companies (ie. a cluster of Linux servers for computationally-intensive tasks)
  • Training – showing people how to use or write open source software
  • Programming – writing open source software

Many businesses have been built around open source software. Notable examples of such projects include MySQL, SpamAssassin, and IBM’s Eclipse. These businesses use several different models to arrive at profitability, which I’ll discuss in future posts.

Street Performer Protocol

Published on December 9, 2006 in Intellectual property. 0 Comments

Here’s an interesting idea for all those music performers, software designers, book writers, and pretty much anyone else who creates works that can be easily shared electronically. Create a sample of what you can do and then get people to donate to an escrow that will pay you when you complete your work. When your work is done, it gets released into the public domain and you get the donated money. If you don’t finish your work in the allotted time, then the people that donated get their money back.

Instead of having people pay by the book, song, or software package, authors get a lump sum and agree to release the work to the public domain. This lets those with limited financial resources benefit from creative works of others despite not being able to pay them back.

Of course, there are issues with the SPP. For example, it might be hard to get people to donate at first. I’d hope that as more people became comfortable with this way of doing things, that people would start donating more freely.

The original paper on SPP and Wikipedia provide more details.