Friday, Jul 25, 2008
Hackers scorn the theory that the economic downturn could hurt open-source software.
May 18, 2001 | My column Thursday, which used the collapse of open-source start-up Eazel as a launching point for exploring whether the current economic downturn could have a deleterious effect on the pace of free-software development, elicited numerous interesting responses. Just about everybody disagreed with me, from open-source luminaries to grass-roots hackers. Here are some of the more insightful comments.
Michael Tiemann, a founder of Cygnus Software who is now chief technical officer at Red Hat, made the intriguing argument that tight times will actually spur more free-software development:
"Saw your article mourning Eazel, and I wanted to let you know that things are not as dark as you might think. I meet with CIOs and CTOs on a weekly basis, and things are definitely darker in the I.T. organizations of major corporations than they are here in Durham. They say 'nobody ever got fired for buying X, Y or Z,' but in today's economy, if you buy the high-cost solution, you will be fired (or at least, be laid off with the rest of your department). The only way people can get their jobs done is to do much more with much less, which is what Red Hat Linux makes possible.
"The downturn has increased the opportunity for our low-cost, high-value solution, and while getting the money to flow has been a challenge for everybody, we are farther up the competitive ladder than we've ever been. To back that up, if you look at our last seven quarters as a public company, they've all been up, with profitability increasing. Most of the tech sector has announced negative revenue growth in one if not both of the past two quarters. If we achieve the most recent guidance we gave to Wall Street in the last call, we'll deliver over $130M in revenue with earnings of 10 cents per share this fiscal year. That's a significant accomplishment for any software company, proprietary or open source.
"None of this has been (or will be) easy to deliver. But then again, we were never under the delusion that it would be."
-- Michael Tiemann
"That might be true of the U.S., but many of the contributors [to GNOME] are not from the U.S., where the picture is definitely a lot different. I was working in Mexico making a miserable salary (which I am not going to quote, as it is a bit embarrassing), and many of the people working with me in GNOME and other free-software projects there were making even less money than I was.
"The same thing happens with all the contributors from Europe: Many times they are working on this in their spare time, but they never got to enjoy the economic 'boom' that we saw in the United States.
"For instance, a third of the development force of Ximian is not based in the U.S., because the talent was available outside the United States. Our employees were active contributors to the GNOME project that we convinced to join us, and they do not want to move away from their countries (and I can see why people living in Milan or Prague or Madrid or Adelaide would not like to move to Boston ;-). Actually, thinking about it, I think I would be a lot happier going back to Mexico, but I have to manage my developer team here in Boston. Oh well.
"I have been doing this for 10 years, and doing this only for the last 18 months in the United States with a U.S.-level salary. I began in 1991 or 1990 working on free software, and the motivation was never monetary. I think it is a bit of a political statement, and many of the programmers working on free software feel compelled to change the world in the way we are good at, which is contributing to a free-software project."
-- Miguel de Icaza
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