Are you a software engineer? Programmer? QA specialist? How long have you been at your current position? How long do you expect to be? I bet it’s less than 5 years.
Why would that be an important issue for open source? Most of the time you spend most of your time working OSS projects at home, right? But I bet someday you’d like to get paid for that work, unless like some OSS developers you base your happiness on the proliferation of your software.
So one day you are going to pack up and leave your company, and all of it’s proprietary software behind. And if you are developing Python, that probably means you are leaving a gaping, expensive hole for your former employer. But what if you could keep working for that employer, after you left? What if what you were doing at the new job was so transferable that you could be productive from day 1?
This is the promise that is OSS. And while this promise is probably idealist, it ha
s at least one tentacle sticking out from reality. The fact is, workers are migratory these days. Personally I think this is because short-sighted investors value fiscal gains over a longer payoff, but we do live in the day of day-trading. The fact is, many people don’t see programmers for what they really are, a mixture of engineer, mathematician and artist. I can always seem to find someone who will pay me more money to do the same job I already have. When something I just can’t turn down for my family’s sake comes up, I have to take it. For this reason programmers, and even the greater workforce migrates.
Employers have already realized that employees are migratory. They have all but done-away with pension plans in exchange for portability: the 401k. Who cares what kind of health insurance we offer? 80/20 is now the norm, because employers don’t expect to have to pay in the long run, and employees accept it too, because they don’t expect to be working at the company for the long haul, when health insurance becomes more of a factor.
But lets get back to the original question. What does a migratory worker mean to open source. Portability of work. I can take my Django/Turbogears/Zope knowledge to any other company using these technologies and pick up right where I left off. If I am one of the few developing software in the OSS world (as apposed to just using it) I can actually contribute more to my OSS project on my companies dime. The question is, are the companies really losing out by providing their software to the world?
Definitely not. In fact, companies stand to gain much more by choosing (and contributing to) something “free” and open. They retain some value from their employee after said person has left the company. Bug patches, new features, etc. all pulled from the same pot they were putting their goodies in before. Since the software is open and free, more people have access to it in the age where replication of information is almost cost-less. That means they have a larger work force to choose from, and more experts and shared expertise to gain from.
So then the question becomes, “As a company, why should I contribute to open source?” The fact is you are going to get back more than you give. Your employees will gain greater expertise by helping to build the tools that they use. Additionally, the company is helping to keep the project’s momentum going, which ensures the OSS project’s longevity. It is no secret that “feature complete” projects often fall by the wayside, regardless of quality. By playing an active role in a project’s development, you are ensuring that that project will be available, and have a good support system even if your employees have moved on.
If you are a company who is battling with the decision to contribute to, or even use open source, I implore you to look seriously at your options, your [migratory] workforce, and your ability to develop a product for the long haul. I bet you find more value in free software than the sticker price. Software, more than ever, is about the people, not the product.
Tags: 401k, migratory workforce, open source software, OSS, software engineering
A spin from the organizations point of view:
1: I am not too sure if the organization would want “any” of the work developed to be published in the public domain. It simply opens up the code for
a) hackers to find better ways to get into the system
b) allow competition to figure out how their competitor is doing
c) allow competition to “steal” ideas and expand on that back in their own organization without contributing back to OSS
2: Organizations perceive that developers can easily be replaced by paying more. They’d rather pay and get a good guy to replace a outgoing employee. The new employee may not do justice to the expectations of the business as the last employee who left did. BUT, organizations would prefer to manage such deficiencies.
A spin from the OSS developers point of view:
1: I think the primary focus of any developer is to build product / solution that can benefit multiple organizations using the same configurable source code. Building custom source code will only restrict the usage to a smaller set of customers.
2: OSS will only have meaning when customers use it to run their business. The more critical the need, the greater the value the OSS software will hold. Softwares HAVE to be customer oriented. Solutions built for “a” customer will have its own limitations when seeking wider acceptance.
3: Great OSS requires great guys to spend good amount of time to build a complete solution. This needs time and someone has to pay the developer. With OSS, since software is free for download, many organizations will try it. Some of them will come back to the developer for support / maintainance / enhancement etc. This will give the developer 2 IMPORTANT things:
a) Revenue to sustain his creative work
b) Feedback from many users which can enhance the product
I think OSS is a GREAT idea. There are many creative developers who have good ideas on how we can make things better, cannot find a channel to express their ideas, market them and also earn from it (which they deserve).
G