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Why do Open Source?

4 replies on 1 page. Most recent reply: Apr 26, 2008 5:15 AM by Matthew Wilson

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Matthew Wilson

Posts: 145
Nickname: bigboy
Registered: Jun, 2004

Why do Open Source? (View in Weblogs)
Posted: Apr 26, 2008 5:15 AM
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Summary
A few days ago I was in the office of one of my clients, talking to the dev guys about Pantheios (what else?!), and they were asking why I do open-source. The resulting discussion was quite illuminating, not least to me, so I thought it might be useful to discuss it here and see why other people do it.
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Recently, I was talking with the development team at one of my clients about introducing some open source libraries into their product suite, as we work on refactoring it and getting it modernised and the code base under control. As we talked about the various open source libraries available, including several of my own, the guys asked me why I do open source. I told them a little story of humbling experience of failure:

 
"Long ago (in the mid/late 1990s), I created a powerful set of Windows Custom Controls. In this panoply of fearsome weaponry resided an extended List Box, with multi-columns, floating editable cells, individually coloured cells, rich clipboard functionality, context menus, check-box selection, and sophisticated automatic sorting functionality. Quick on its heels (over the course of a year) came extended Combo Box, List View, Progress Bar, Status Bar, Size Grip, Edit Bar, Edit Cell, Button Box, Hex View, Image Button, Hyperlink, and Context Help controls, all of which were dripping with cool (and easy-to-use) features. To this day, they contain functionality that is not available in Windows itself.

The initial implementations of the first couple were written in MFC (!), as that was my main tool for writing C++ at the time. (I learnt C/C++ on various UNIX flavours at Uni, and then used Borland Turbo C++ in my post-graduates research for three years, but then went to VC++ 1.5 in my first job. The vestiges of each of these experiences are still in my practice: I always define the nul-terminator as '\0'; I always save my files about every 5 seconds with a flash of the keyboard that is visible neither to the naked eye nor to my consciousness; I use m_ as the prefix to my member variables)

Use of MFC was quickly dispensed with, as the limitations of being coupled to such a wretched pile of crap became evident to me. In fact, it's fair to say that my deep understanding (and abject loathing) of coupling was formed in those days, and it informs my practice still. Those of you who grok shims may give pause to thank the evil that is MFC: being stymied by its coupling, and wanting to generalise the manipulation of windows between MFC, the "new" ATL, and my own window façade types led to the first attribute shim, get_HWND(), which now resides in the STLSoft libraries.

Anyway, back to the custom controls. I can remember thinking at the time that I would be able to sell these, along with the SDK, to clients who wanted sophisticated and easy-to-use windowing components all over the globe, and then be able to retire and ride my bike forever more. It didn't quite work out like that. I was smart enough (but only after I'd spent all the effort) to realise the daunting challenge it would be to control installation and version, handle environmental issues and bug reports, and manage the trade-offs between protecting intellectual property and hindering users. And then there's the hassles of the financial side and the daunting nature of the warranties. Long story short is that the controls were never commercialised. They see action in various bespoke projects for clients from time to time, as well as in several of my internal / free tools. But all that effort has never seen a direct payoff. The payoff in learning was immense, however, and I'm very glad for it. "
 

(I've been occasionally asked by clients whether I can make them available, and I still may do so, though as each year goes by there seems less and less point, given the increasing use of .NET in the Windows GUI space. And then there's the issue that useful GUIs are disappearing in favour of browsers and other doodads for which you have to use a blasted mouse, since efficiency in the user interaction seems to have as little regard in modern thinking as efficiency in software. Anyhoo ... back on theme)



So, fast forward a decade or so, and now I'm a huge fan and user and creator of open source: I have several libraries of major/moderate/minor significance, and this year will see another handful. I spend a lot of time working on them, ostensibly for free, and it's the designs inside these libraries that generally hold my interest rather more than those in my commercial activities. What gives?

I'd suggest the following reasons, in no particular order of importance, are why I do it. Some of these may apply to others (and some may not apply to anyone without my particular psychological pathologies):
  • Liberation From Warranty. When you don't have to release a fully-polished version, you can release something that works well "here" and people who need it "there" will assist (either in reports or advice or patches) in evolving it in that direction.
  • Evolution. Even the most foresightful person - and that's not me by a country mile - cannot imagine all the permutations of their work. (I never dreamed of the Type Tunnel pattern when I was working on shims for generalising interfaces: it just emerged from the work.) When there are thousands of eyes on your work, they make requests for the things that they need, things that you'd never have conceived.
  • Many Eyes make Correct Work. When there are thousands of eyes on your work, bugs get identified very rapidly. There's no commercial substitute for this phenomenon. (Look at the operating system world ...)
  • Porting by proxy. When there are thousands of eyes on your work, and some of those are in the heads of people who need it for a platform it currently does not work for, the portability naturally arises.
  • Ego. There's no way to say this that'll make you like me, so I'll just give it straight: I am a ridiculously competitive person, and it is the best part of the game when I can invent something that no-one else has ever come up with, and it is better - faster and usually also more robust, extensible and portable - than any competing library. It's all very well thinking that you've done such things in your own back garden, but putting things out into the world, code-included, is likely to test such egotistical musings in a very short space of time. Most fail, some succeed (e.g. Pantheios).
  • Liberation (somewhat) from Delivery Schedules. This is something to be careful with, as it's easy to become known as a provider of vapourware. (I'm known as such in the D world, since I promised a lot, and have (as yet) delivered little - though I still plan to when I retire ;-) Nonetheless, it's a lot easier to miss a proposed deadline when your users aren't paying you, and are probably actively sympathetic, since they may be in the same boat.
  • Excused Documentation. My Achilles' heel is documentation, at least for open source work. When you're not being paid by a client, it's all too easy to work on the next smart evolution than document the current one. Although this is not a good situation, it's still something that the open source is moderately forgiving of. (It's not hard to go too far, though: the STLSoft libraries, while supporting a number of successful libraries, are themselves still largely unappreciated, and that's in no small part to do with the fact that the documentation is nothing short of woeful. It's been on my TODO list for 4+ years, and I'm hoping to get to it this year, but there's no promising ...)
  • Loss Leader. Open source projects can be used as a base, upon which viable commercial practice sits. For example, a major financial organisation recently engaged Synesis Software to write custom a front-end & back-end to Pantheios to tailor it to their precise needs and to ensure that not a single wasted instruction gets in the way of their application's speed. (Their name, business, product and the details of the customisations are under NDA because they don't want their competitors to know that/how they're using Pantheios; but they're in New York, and they reckon they're producing log output at a rate faster than any software system previously created. You figure out what they're up to. <g>) As seems to be the case with many UNIX folks, they have very high efficiency and robustness requirements and were dissatisfied by the characteristics of other logging libraries. And they're remarkably pleased by the performance of Pantheios, commenting that it has "clock-cycle speed"!
  • Ease of Introduction. This is a terribly prosaic reason, but potentially the most significant. When I go to a new client, and we need to introduce something into their codebase, it's simple and straightforward when it's open source. There're no concerns with licensing (because I use the simplified BSD, which does not "infect" a commercial code base with the requirement to open up itself, a la GPL's copyleft), payment, warranties, library evolution, or anything else. For me, the biggest single change in how I interact with clients is in terms of my using trusted libraries (my own, and others) in the client systems. Since I've made much of my work available as open source, my life as a consultant is much simplified. (And there's the not-insignificant reality of the economics: I can earn more in a day as a consultant than I would likely have earned in a year from any given commercialised closed source software component.)

So, I'm a firm open source fan who sees a viable commercial side to it. Most of my coding work is open source, most of my paid work is consultancy, and each washes the hands of the other. And the best part is that my (open source) users and my (commercial) clients benefit from both aspects.

What's your take on open source? Why do you do it? What benefits do you glean?


David Eriksson

Posts: 13
Nickname: twogood
Registered: Apr, 2005

Re: Why do Open Source? Posted: Apr 29, 2008 1:44 AM
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I wish I was doing consulting just like you! :-)

The "Ease of Introduction" is only easy when the Open Source software has a suitable license. No company selling proprietary software would like to have it "infected" with GPL...

That's why some companies have a third party product control board that need to approve all Open Source software added or even updated... :-)

Taylor Cowan

Posts: 10
Nickname: taylorc
Registered: Nov, 2003

Re: Why do Open Source? Posted: Apr 30, 2008 8:07 AM
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I see nothing wrong with your point about Ego. I agree with it 100%. In any other field of endeavor it's assumed, I see no reason why software engineering should be any different.

Matthew Wilson

Posts: 145
Nickname: bigboy
Registered: Jun, 2004

Re: Why do Open Source? Posted: Apr 30, 2008 9:48 PM
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> I wish I was doing consulting just like you! :-)

:-)

(Actually, the little conscience on my shoulder is forever telling me that I should be grateful for clients, and not resentful that they're stealing my time away from what I love - researching and writing open source libs and writing books about that.)

> The "Ease of Introduction" is only easy when the Open
> Source software has a suitable license. No company selling
> proprietary software would like to have it "infected" with
> GPL...
>
> That's why some companies have a third party product
> control board that need to approve all Open Source
> software added or even updated... :-)

That's a good point. I always use BSD, and have never had any hassles with that. I'll amend the article to mention that.

Thanks

Matthew Wilson

Posts: 145
Nickname: bigboy
Registered: Jun, 2004

Re: Why do Open Source? Posted: Apr 30, 2008 9:49 PM
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> I see nothing wrong with your point about Ego. I agree
> with it 100%. In any other field of endeavor it's
> assumed, I see no reason why software engineering should
> be any different.

True. I guess I just feel the need to put it up there up-front, along with a disclaimer.

-- "Arrogance and self-awareness seldom go hand-in-hand", M

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