Products and Open Source, Revisited

Spacemonkey — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 20:59:00 +0000

We’ve written before on the suspicion that products and open source software don’t mix all that well.

TechCrunch writes an article titled How Grey Is Your Valley: Making Money From Open Source where they question the motives of Matt Mullenweg.

Matt owns a company, and also is a lead contributor to an open source project. The issue stated by TechCrunch is that the main product provided by Matt’s company depends on the open source project – or more importantly, the lack of a competitor provided in the open source project.

There are some loud protests at the accusations, one of which titled TechCrunch Questions Matt Mullenweg’s Ethics at OpenSourceCommunity.org.

I remember several core developers on some open source projects I once contributed to coming under fire with the same allegations. While I defended them at the time – as my own understanding of the logic made sense, as the things that were turned into products were not multi-purpose and had deployment requirements that just didn’t fit being default – I cannot really defend Matt’s predicament as spam filtering to me seems like an obviously stock thing that needs to be done.

On the flip side, Akismet is more than a product, it is a service, and providing that service carries a cost. How can such a service be provided for free?

It is my belief that anyone that plays a major role on an open source project cannot really profit from that effort, lest they have thick enough skin to tolerate the backlash of accusations and so on. This isn’t new, folks.

Open Source Hypocrisy: Products and Open Source, Revisited

Products and Open Source, Revisited