by Alec Muffett
I was out to dinner with Whit Diffie and @adriana872 at the weekend, and Whit quoted something that he’d heard somewhere in the upper echelons of Sun:
There’s Free (as in Beer) and Free (as in Speech) but the lesser-known third option is Free (as in Puppies)
That’s where you give someone something for free where they think they’re getting a really good deal, but in reality they will be paying for, for years to come.
Apparently it was a speculative business model.
That was Jonathan Schwartz’s original view of open source, pre-conversion.
It was also used to explain to various management levels that bringing open source into our products may not have involved paying license fees, but someone had to do the work to take care of it, because customers didn’t see value in us shipping years out of date versions of packages that were missing the latest features or security fixes, as they kept wanting to just shove it in and forget it, not assign staff to ongoing maintenance.
Alan’s comment is true of all software written, not just that which comes from open source. The real problem was that updating a particular package that had external origins is that it was sufficiently arduous that nobody was particularly interested in doing anything after they’d been bitten the first time getting the first source code drop in. Thus the problem of keeping source code up to date is a reflection of the procedures being inadequate in dealing with software that wasn’t built in house. And because of the general distaste for the procedures from engineers and lack of interest in external software from management, nobody made the process any better or tried to improve the situation. I’m sure if someone stood in line to receive a bonus of $1 per open source package that was up to date on a quarterly basis then things would have improved, especially if you look at open source methods for this (such as pkgsrc used by SmartOS) where over 9,000 packages are present.
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