[OSGeo-Discuss] Question about FOSS4G Business Models

[Miles Fidelman]

One more reference:

Wikipedia's history of open source
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_history) has a pretty good
discussion
of the early days of software development - when pretty much everything
was open source, but the term had
not been coined yet.

Miles

Miles Fidelman wrote:
> 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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