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Rich Green, Senior VP at Sun Microsystems, comments on paying FOSS developers for their contributions: Sun is proposing that open-source developers be paid for the revenue-generating technology that they have made available for free.
At the CommunityOne and NetBeansDay events in San Francisco on Monday, Rich Green, Sun executive vice president for software, expressed doubts about the current model in which open-source developers create free intellectual property and have others scoop it up to generate huge amounts of revenue.
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The current scenario is Robin Hood backwards: stealing from the poor and making others rich, said Green. I am fully supportive of FOSS developers getting their due. Still, I can't help but wonder- there may be reasons why FOSS supporters would not embrace the idea, despite its simplicity and importance.
First, a system where only some developers are paid contrasts with various ideals of the FOSS community. When nobody, or very very few developers are paid, everyone can say they are part of a revolution. But when only the best are paid, there arises two classes of FOSS developers- some are part of a revolution, the others are wannabees.
Second, many FOSS organizations pride themselves on not being "corrupted" by capital. Payments to developers would entail formal capital processes. How would FOSS firms explain this?
Third, there is an innately strange logic to volunteer developers. Their prize is often a paid development job, thus to justify their lack of such a position, they tout the virtues of working for free. Clamoring about the ideals of peer-production also allows them to keep other volunteer developers off guard, so the suckers won't compete with them for paid positions. This game won't work when pay-checks are floating around.
Finally, the FOSS community has complained about the cost of IP due diligence, claiming that copyrights and patents raise the costs of innovation, and thereby impose barriers to entry and harming innovation. A similar situation may occur when some developers are paid and some are not. FOSS firms may need to fork over checks to attract top developers from other distributions. Would this be anything other than unproductive community in-fighting?
This is not the first time FOSS' informal organization has been criticized, as Professor Richard Epstein has questioned the sustainability of FOSS without formal capital and organizational structures. However, its about time an organization like Sun, with FOSS business lines, addresses the issue.
posted by Noel Le @ 7:46 PM | Free Culture Movement
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