Open Source Economics

Phil Mattison said:
> is) the question remains, why? As a programmer, what's in it for you?
> What's in it for all the programmers who contribute to open source
> projects? Or at least, what do they *think* is in it for them? I have
> yet to hear (read) anyone say, "I worked on X because I got Y as a
> result."

Hmm okay. A tiny bit of history. I was working in the mortgage banking
industry nearly a decade ago. I was writing what would now be called a
"web service". I ran into this problem. To make my programming language
(Active Server Pages) do something I wanted it to do, I had to use the
latest and greatest version of DAO/RDO. However, when I upgraded to that
version of of DAO/RDO, I encountered a database bug I didn't see before.
I found a patch for that bug. However, after applying that DAO/RDO
stopped working altogether. Low and behold, in the ERRATA it stated the 3
were in compatiable. So Microsoft's connection engine, programming
language and database could all do what I wanted just not together.

I had a young programmer working for me that said try PHP/Apache/MySQL.
So I did. It seemed nice, but I was VERY leary. I ran some benchmarks, I
threw everything I had at that mother. About two hours later it appeared
the server crashed. Ha! I knew it. Linux is a piece of dung! So we
started to see why... Well we were throwing so much at it, we ran out of
diskspace. Linux didnt crash it just no longer was able to save the data
coming across. :) I looked at the performance logs and we never went
about 20%. I was sold.

In using PHP, I would encounter problems and send patches to the
maintainer (Rasmus Lerdorf at that time). I did so only because I
SELFISHLY needed the fixes for my work to continue. Later that year I
left the company I was working at and started my own.

During this time I started adding code to PHP and Mozilla because I needed
them for the project I was working on for a client, that I was trying to
turn into our flagship product. Eventually we decided that collaboration
was best and started working with GNU Project. We birthed GNU Enterprise
out of that. While I now do work elsewhere, I continued to contribute to
GNU Enterprise because it was fun. It was family to be honest.

Programming on Free Software is very much a social activity for me. I am
very socialistic in my political views and so it also brings me
satisfaction to do works that would benefit others than myself. My day
job pays the bills, why not let my hobby help others.

That said, I do have commercial interests in Free Software (gasp shock
awe) they just are not a motiving factor in the equation for me. Like
most programmers I make my living on software that is never sold to
anyone.

I could go on and on, but I will spare you all. There is a very real
reason I am so pro-Freedom in software, that is an interesting story.

-Derek