Ian pointed out this article via Twitter (I starting to get used to Twitter now that I have a client embedded in my iGoogle page). It a discussion by the author about whether community members who take but don't contribute back is good or bad for the health of the community. I think the argument is presented well on both sides, including quotes from our friends Michael Scharf (on the bad side) and Mike Milinkovich (on the good side). I think in the past I've gone on record as saying that it's disappointing when vendors don't contribute back, but that I understand the reasons why. And the author did point out those reasons.
But I think this is an important thing to consider at this stage of Eclipse's life cycle. Eclipse is a mature open source project. Vendors who were there in the early days have had long enough to figure out whether their investment in open source reaped the return they were hoping. And in these economic times, you'll see these vendors faced with the decision on what to do with that investment. Good, you do more; bad, you reduce.
And I think the results are a mixed bag. Clearly for the CDT, the growth of the community was phenomenal. I see a lot of recognition that the CDT is now the defacto standard C/C++ IDE, especially in the embedded space. Most vendors there have dropped competing products and jumped on the bandwagon. Customers are well aware of the CDT and that plays into their purchasing decisions.
But there's one factor of the "leeching" that somewhat scares me. What ends up happening is that it appears that you are investing in making your competitors' products better, while they are not reciprocating. That doesn't make much business sense. But that is a factor that's starting to get added to the equation. ROI is one thing, but supporting the competition while getting less in return is a nasty consequence.
The conclusion of the article really drove home that point for me. "..., the culture of collaboration, which is really the ideal of open source, doesn't run very deep in most companies. Institutions, as Woods pointed out, simply aren't wired that way -- yet." I think more effort needs to be put into changing the wiring...
I think it was Jeff McAffer who brought it to my attention that organizations have to go several levels from leecher to open source leader (A talk at ESE in Esslingen). And no level can be omitted and takes some time.
ReplyDeleteSo at which levels are companies as organizations in the eclipse world? How can we increase the transition probabilities?
Gerd
I agree with the conclusion, and the sentiment of frustration when people don't give back.
ReplyDeleteHowever on the flip side the *best* thing about this sword is it's double-edged. Leechers don't contribute, and guess what? Their products and proprietary extensions don't integrate in the next release.
One of the biggest arguments I made to management/legal who were scared of just what this post describes is this: when each release of Eclipse is made, those companies who contribute guarantee their product still works. Those who don't contribute enter merge hell.
Doesn't that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside -- open-source social justice of sorts!
The _only_ way to have a platform the works for everyone is if everyone puts their stake in the ground (or for no one to...).
Don't underestimate the pain some companies will be going through right now. Some of the vendor's IDEs I've glanced at recently are sat on CDT 4. Why? It worked at the time, now it's too painful, nay too proprietary, to sync to 6...
I'm tickled pink that you used the word leech in a blog. I was told explicitly never to use that term in a blog. Being out spoken is not always considered a valuable attribute; go figure! I did anyway, but I used a photo of a leech as a way to "tastefully" slip in the term. Leeches sure aren't pretty!
ReplyDeleteCDT is one of Eclipse's great success stories and you personally are one of the linchpins to that success. Return on investment is indeed important, but the ugly fact is that it's not properly measured. While executives might assert they are making astute business decisions, they are doing so without meaningful facts and figures to back them up. It's more than a little appalling if you ask me, but of course they don't. You only optimize what you measure and if you don't/can't measure the value of open source you won't be making good business decisions about it.
There's an opportunity in this oversight...
As you know I'm working for one of the companies that "leeches" off Eclipse. We're associate members, but that does not amount to much. While we do contribute; bug reports and a few patches, we don't have the resources to put more effort into it (personally I wish different). I believe many companies basing their products on Eclipse are in the same situation.
ReplyDeleteAs a side note: I also like to mention that we've done a huge effort in getting our GCC/binutils stuff upstream. We're also adding more resources to that team. So we are focused on open source and are very much aware of it's (dis)advantages, but not as much on Eclipse. Considering that we give away all our software tools for free (and some is FOSS), I don't think I should have a bad conscience.
You say that you are "investing in making your competitior's products better". I think that is true, but only to some extent. _You_ get to decide what the basic feature set will be like. You'll be ahead of everyone else. We for instance, implemented a entire new target view (and everything around it) instead of using the RSE targets view because we were not happy with it. But these days we're adopting TCF while paying very close attention in being compatible. I think both your's and our customers will be happy about that decision. At least those who are not locked into one silicon vendor.