How much do I hear for this perl script?

New O'Reilly venture creates an auction scheme for open-source software projects.

By Andrew Leonard

May 14, 1999 | Open source is going on the auction block. Brian Behlendorf, chief technical officer for O'Reilly & Associates, announced Friday the debut of Sourcexchange, a for-profit clearinghouse for open-source software development projects.

Behlendorf, who is also the chief coordinator of the Apache Web server project, calls Sourcexchange "a marketplace for contract development for open-source software." The intention, he says, is to provide a place where corporations or other "sponsors" with specific software needs -- such as, for example, a driver for a particular 3D video card -- can contract with open-source developers to get the job done.

The basic mechanism is simple. A company will make a "request for proposals" -- "this is what I want done, this is how much I'll pay for it," Behlendorf explains -- and then developers will make their bids. Sourcexchange will broker the deal, ensuring payment, peer review and other services. The underlying idea, says Behlendorf, is to create a free-market mechanism for accelerating open-source software development. All code produced via Sourcexchange contracts will be archived at the site, and protected by open-source licenses.

O'Reilly will officially announce the project at next week's LinuxExpo, and is billing the project as "the first of its kind for the open-source community." That's not quite true. Axel Boldt, a math professor at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minn., has been operating the very similar Free Software Bazaar for at least six months. But Boldt's clearinghouse is a grass-roots project in which the typical bid is $50 or $100 for a basic Perl script. And progress has been slow.

"It's pretty embryonic at this point," says Chris Browne, a software developer who has placed a bid at the Free Software Bazaar. Browne said one of the Bazaar's problems is getting noticed by a wide enough core of developers to be useful. Another is ensuring that there is enough trust between the people who commission projects and the people who promise to develop them that the work actually gets done -- and, most important, paid for.

That's where O'Reilly will make its presence felt. As Browne notes, "O'Reilly has a big enough name to sort of blunder through and people will actually pay attention to it."

Behlendorf says Sourcexchange will have several built-in features to ensure smooth operation. For example, companies that want to sponsor projects will have to immediately fork over to Sourcexchange the cash they plan to offer for successful project completion. Sourcexchange will then hold that cash in escrow until the project is finished, upon which it will immediately pay the developer. Behlendorf also described a system in which "peer reviewers" -- well-known developers drawn from the open-source community -- will monitor the interaction between developers and sponsors.

Last week, Microsoft senior vice president Jim Allchin riled the open-source community by blurting, in reference to the Linux operating system, that "the profit motive will end up ruining and tarnishing the altruism people use to promote this thing."

And, to be sure, O'Reilly plans to run Sourcexchange as a for-profit enterprise, extracting fees from the companies that wish to be sponsors. But the ultimate goal, says Behlendorf, is to actually provide a way to encourage open-source development without getting bogged down in proprietary quicksand.

"The companies that participate in the open-source exchange are ones that are creating their own value add in something else. That's where the real power of open source is," says Behlendorf. "If left to their own devices, companies will try to find proprietary advantage in the software itself. This is a countervailing force to that."

Behlendorf says the initial idea for Sourcexchange grew out of a meeting with Hewlett-Packard in early January.

"That's when the crystallization came," says Behlendorf. "They had a prototype for a system like this and it was pretty good. But we looked at it and said, hey, you need an outside partner to do this. It seemed very interesting to us, because of O'Reilly's position as being somewhat visionary and wanting to push the boundaries of open source."

No doubt some purists will find reasons to look askance at Sourcexchange -- on the surface, the project might seem pretty far afield from the communitarian fervor that fuels the free software/open-source movement. But Behlendorf's got lots of credibility in the open-source world, and it will be intriguing to watch how his new endeavor plays out.

"Whether this is hugely profitable or not," says Behlendorf, "at the end of the day I think we will be doing something good for the community."

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