[OSGeo-Discuss] Question about FOSS4G Business Models

[Miles Fidelman]

Charlie,

Charlie Schweik wrote:
> See
> http://www.umass.edu/opensource/schweik/Chapter_2_schweik_final_draft.pdf
>
> This book still is being finalized and not yet published. If anyone on
> this list reads this chapter, I'd appreciate any comments you may have.
> If you Daniele, or anyone else uses content from this in some capacity,
> I'd appreciate you contacting me so I can give you information on how to
> cite it.
>   
Since you asked.... :-)

A few comments:

1.  I seriously question the characterization of open source as primarily driven by volunteers.  
History says otherwise.  

2. I'd look for some better sources re. monitary support for early open source projects.  
If you look a little harder, you'll find that almost all widely-used open source software
started with somebody who was working at a job that paid them to write an initial
code base - be it working on a a government contract or grant, or working on software
as in internal IT staffer.

The examples I always point to are:

- Apache (started as the NCSA web daemon)

- Unix (it all goes back to Bell Labs, with the BSD variations going back to Berkeley)

- Sendmail

- Postgres

And the list goes on.  (One interesting list of very early projects: http://eu.conecta.it/paper/Some_dates_open_source.html)

Yes, a sizeable portion of contributors are volunteers - but some historical spelunking quickly points out that most projects
started with someone who was being paid for their time.  (Richard Stallman might be the exception, though MIT provided
for his support in various forms).

3. Historically, the motivations you list as "academic and scientific motivation #2 and #3" are the earliest and oldest motivations
for open source code - dating back to the period when government funded work automatically entered the public domain (thus
predating the entire notion of open source licenses).  Almost ALL early software was funded by the government (notably
DARPA and NSF), was shared as academic research, and automatically entered the public domain.

Hope this is useful,

Miles Fidelman


-- 
Miles R. Fidelman, Director of Government Programs
Traverse Technologies 
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