As Matt Mullenweg has pointed out in his blog post, Pligg is selling out, Vanilla is adding spammy links and guess which other open source program will be sponsored by other shady SEO’s — not for the sake of advancing free software ideology, but that they can resell massive amount of link-love for commercial gains. Should have seen this coming with the recent WordPress theme fiasco. Maybe the real enemy of open source is not the competition from proprietary software firms, but the lure of capitalism.
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Faith, Technology and Randomness in Life, According to Scott
Aug 22 2007
I strongly disagree with the dichotomy set up here. Capitalism can be used as a lever to enable social good, especially when combined with Open Source. When you can align the economic and social incentives in a community, thing start to pop.
Matt stole my thought…it’s a false dichotomy in my mind as well.
I would score the “game” in the context of the business model, Ads 1 – Paid Service/Software 0, or some such comparison. Framing it as an economic system vs. software development model contest seems awkward.
Alright. We all know deep in our hearts that the free software movement is communism, don’t we? :)
I am using the term “Capitalism” loosely here. Not capitalism as in an economics system that promotes private ownership, open market and wealth creation, but “capitalism” where maximising production and profit is the only end goal — that’s not the text-book definition, but a definition economists today want us to believe.
When turning a profit or “getting paid” is the ultimate goal, how can it not create dichotomy with open source, where the prime principle is creating software that can be studied, modified and redistributed without any restriction?
The problem is, in an open source community, economical beneficiaries are usually quite different from those who benefit in its social implication. Sure. Some might sponsor a project because he/she can benefit from it economically, and some might sponsor it because of his/her belief in the free software ideology. Sometimes these two groups of people get along well, but sometimes they don’t — which is why we are all commenting on this issue here.
Please. Matt Mullenweg’s holier than though attitude to others continues to sicken me. This is a guy who built a paying business off the top of the open source WordPress. Sure, he was the driving force behind WordPress to start with, but he only earns the right to criticize other business models if and when the entirety of Automattic is turned over to the public domain, after all, he makes money from WordPress as do the others in this post with their various platforms. As long as Mullenweg makes money from the fruits of WordPress he is no worse nor better than the others.
@Duncan,
One thing I found is, a lot of people in media, whether old or new, do not get Open Source/Free Software.
Therefore you cannot say that Matt is hypocritical when Automattic is a commercial entity making money out from Open Source software. Even in the case of Mark O’Sullivan and Vanilla, I do not think that he is wrong, from GPL’s point of view, when he added 3 sponsored links into Vanilla. Anyone can grab the source, and distribute a special ads-free Vanilla! What people care about (or should care about) is the availability of the source, not whether author is making money somewhere. That’s exactly the reason why I think CC-licensed WordPress themes with sponsored links are wrong — because there is no way one can remove the links without violating the license.
However my point in this post is, as the incentive of developing “Open Source” software shifts from free software ideology to economical gains, there lies a danger that some of these open source developers might not continue to contribute and share the code anymore, if sharing the source limits their ability to earn more. In this case, Open Source community looses a development to “capitalism”.
Well. I am not in the position to criticise anyone. I have been a user of free software for almost 15 years, and have contributed little back to the community. :(
I’m not sure if I understand Duncan’s criticism.
Automattic makes money as a business, but a huge amount goes back into the community whether it’s core improvements, like many of the new features coming in 2.3, or things that we don’t benefit from at all, like bbPress, HyperDB, and the few dozen plugins we release.
More importantly while there are 16 people currently working for Automattic, there are 10-20x that number outside of the company making a living from WordPress be it full-time management and development like at b5media or the New York Times or freelancers using the software to develop sites for their clients. In my opinion WordPress has flourished because it enabled an ecosystem far larger than Automattic rather than trying to capture all the value for itself.
I’m a big fan of open-source stuff, but I don’t think that this was necessarily a bad idea. Profit really should be the only reason a business exists — after all, anything else would make it a … non-business.
This doesn’t mean that they made the right decision. After all, they could have found a better way to both monetize and keep it open-source. Bad decisions on the part of businessmen doesn’t reflect poorly on for-profit action, but upon the people themselves.