While Linux is by no means complete, the broad strokes have been filled in: the operating system, the server software, the database.
But at the same time, the stereotype of the lonely programmer working in the wee hours is seriously outdated. The second generation of open source projects responds to specific business demands, and the people building these applications are getting paid — even if the code they write will be free.
“The open source developer today is largely a professional developer who’s been at it for 10-plus [years] and is on a corporate payroll,” said Jeff Hawkins, vice president of Novell’s Linux business office. “Novell and IBM and HP employ people to work on open source projects.”
No stats are available on how much work is being done by developers on a payroll as opposed to community volunteers. The picture gets murkier when you try to evaluate the contributions in terms of lines of code.
“You think of projects being big groups, and there are hundreds of people who contribute,” said Bob Bickel, vice president of corporate development and strategy for Jboss, which creates and supports open source server software.
In reality, just as in commercial software development, just a few people write most of the code. “There might be hundreds of people who contribute one line of code,” he said.
It’s also a question of point of view. Independent advocates like to point to the thousands of projects listed on SourceForge, the Grand Central of open source development.
“If you go to www.sourceforge.net, you will see 824,069 open source developers registered to work on 78,915 projects. To say that all of these are ‘paid developers under one corporate roof’ is fairly far from reality,” said Jon “maddog” Hall, executive director of Linux International.
Executives with commercial open source companies counter that most of those projects are stalled, and, if you limit the count to software with immediate utility, the real action is in-house.
The reason, they say, is simple: “If there’s very much work around an open source project, that developer has to get paid in some way, shape or form,” Bickel said. “There are only so many people who can afford to write code for free. Serious software has to get funded some way.”
Even Hall agreed that the in-house model has become more prevalent. And he concurred with others that the shift happened in the mid-1990s. It’s just that the stereotype never got updated.
Bickel said there are two ways to fund free software: Create a company that can profit from services or enhancements to the free code, or find a corporate sugar daddy. Since the mid-1990s, corporate sponsors have played an increasing role. At first, they hired developers, then gave them free rein to work on open source.
For example, according to Hall, IBM hired Ken Coar, a contributor to the Apache Project, so that he could work on it full-time. “It helped out with their WebSphere, I’m sure,” he said. “If you see someone who is a really good programmer who’s developing a project that’s imperative to you, to hire them makes good business sense.”
But now, the companies are more demanding. Their customers need certain functions or applications, and they need them fast.
“The broad horizontal infrastructure is a vibrant target for the community development model, said Dave Fraser, chief marketing officer of Wind River Systems, maker of open source software for embedded systems.
But as open source moves up the stack from operating systems and databases to applications, what’s needed are specialists.
“By its very nature, there are fewer and fewer people who are capable or interested in working on it for free,” Fraser said. “I don’t imagine that just because the State of California decides to go open source, everyone will jump in to build a hospital billing application. They’re not going to be turned on by something like that.”
Please see page 2 to read how Sun and others manage the process.
A project also may be too complicated for the majority of community developers. Take OpenOffice and StarOffice, the open source alternatives to Microsoft Office.
“Sun [Microsystems] pays the salaries for the majority of the developers who are actively contributing code,” said Sam Hiser, marketing project lead for OpenOffice. “Sun has a pretty traditional development model that they use to encourage stability.”
Hiser admitted that OpenOffice isn’t as open as many in the community would like, but Sun has elected this model because it’s a complex product. “The larger and more mature the code is, the harder it is for any individual to come to it and see what needs doing.”
Even if a technology demanded by business customers interests the developer community, the marketplace may not be able to wait for the process. “Businesses have to be driven by timelines and schedules and roadmaps,” said Novell’s Hawkins. “We like to show customers roadmaps with features and delivery dates.”
That doesn’t play in the open source community, where a leadership committee may set broad goals and a flexible schedule. “You can’t bring many of the corporate pressures to bear on finishing,” Hawkins said. “It requires the exercise of patience and tolerance by companies in order to achieve outcomes that are wanted.”
Community takes time. “If you want a new feature in the kernel, you can suggest it, the community will look at it, and maybe it will appear three kernel revisions down the road,” Hall said. “On the other hand, you can hire a programmer to write the feature. You could be the only company that ever used it — or it might go into the regular kernel. [In that case,] you wanted it, you wrote it, you paid for it, and you got it in your timeframe.”
An example of community lag-time is the original Netscape browser, said Henry Hall (no relation to maddog), president of software consultancy Wild Open Source. “They threw out hundreds of thousands of lines of code. The community said, ‘Hey, this is great stuff.’ Then, it took a year and a half until anything started happening with it,” he said. “It takes a long time to read that amount of code — and Netscape was lucky that the code was picked up at all.”
Wild Open Source is a hybrid business that operates on the border between community and corporate. It provides development-for-hire to companies that need integration with open source technology or software built on top of it. Clients can tell the programmers exactly what they want them to do.
“The most efficient way is to hire someone to code what you need,” said Henry Hall. But negotiating that border between work for-hire and open source takes finesse. “The way our contracts work, they own the code. “But we’ve written it in such a way that it’s able to be integrated into the Linux kernel and improve it. And we encourage the owners of code to do that.” In fact, Wild Open Source will handle submission to the community at no extra charge.
Developing open source in-house, then releasing it to the community for review and possible enhancement, as Jboss and other companies do, could prove the best of both worlds. Providing dedicated staffers with a paycheck gets the job done, and then the community provides ad hoc QA.
“The community is very good at responding to problems,” Henry Hall said. “Even if you’re a 24/7 shop, you may get a very quick response, because some people are awake somewhere in the world. You can get the support when you need it, guaranteed.”
Linux development will continue apace, maddog Hall said, right alongside community development.
“There will be people who develop targeted projects and may contribute them back to the community,” maddog Hall said. “And there will continue to be people who work on the Linux kernel just because they like it. They’ll work on it in their spare time, and do very good work. Maybe their management will smile upon it and give them a little slack time during the day. If not, they’ll work on it at home as a hobby.”
