Open Source Hypocrisy

My name’s Mitch and I’m an open source developer. That means I write code and give it away freely, under an open source license.

I do this because I strive for a common good; and have this romantic notion that there are others out there that would like to share their knowledge with me in a cooperative fashion.

Now on to the impetus behind this website.

While celebrating my birthday, we were walking across the street on the corner by our apartment here in New York City. While crossing, a woman driving a golden-brown SUV (Acura, IIRC) blazed down the street, most likely doing 1.5 times the speed limit. Or maybe more…

She refused to yield, despite us being in the right by crossing at the intersection; and as we pulled our kids back to safety she swerved to get around us, flapping her arms (and mouth) and gesticulating wildly. Her expression was clear, she was horribly put off by the lowly pedestrian scum blocking her path to the diamond store or wherever she was going.

I turned and walked behind her as she drove down the street. I held out both of my arms in confusion, clearly asking “Why?”

I was answered with a gesture involving her middle finger and little else.

So what has this to do with Open Source, or the topic of Open Source Hypocrisy?

Attitude, baby, it’s all about attitude.

This woman’s selfish and arrogant attitude mirrors a disturbing trend in the world of Open Source. People aren’t coming to Open Source because they have things to do and want to share in the effort – they are coming to Open Source so they can get their names up in lights, most likely in a vain attempt at easy money later, mostly due to their celebrity status.

Old School

Back in the day, we had stuff to do. It was much simpler then! Our motivation was driven by that simple need. There were no IPOs, no front page articles in trade magazines, no VCs looking for young studs to make rich on their first effort.

We had deadlines just like everyone else, and we shared our knowledge and code in the hopes that we could help each other, and get helped out in the process. Reciprocation, baby.

New School

Forget about getting work done, that’s for the old-timers. We’re the new school, and we’re here solely for the bling. If we don’t get the bling, then we’ll do whatever it takes to set ourselves up to be in the position to get it.

Consider New School as the software development equivalent of the Me Generation. There’s no reciprocation, it’s all about name recognition.

Clash of the Titans

When you have people that take a socialist perspective with software and inject a few selfish, arrogant types that just want their names all over everything, you have a recipe for disaster.

We’ve seen this happen before on open source projects, and presentations have been written up on how to deal with that personality – the most famous of course was the “How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)” presentation given at Google (video) .

I’ve watched projects with a great mix of talent wither to a handful of contributors due to such attitudes. The real whopper here is that usually these people think they are the true champions of open source, when they are essentially champions of themselves, wrapping their selfish motives in the cloak of the GPL, somehow justifying their somewhat suspect motives.

The Purpose of This Site

I’m not starting this site to bash on particular people or projects – even if some make themselves a constant and consistent target. Some people or projects may get mentioned more often than others, but it is the hopes of such critical mention will at least provide some incentive for the offending parties to consider changing their ways.

What’s important here is to bring the focus back to why we took this route in the first place.