I prefer free (libre) software. It is what I familiarize myself with, and what I help others with. And so for this anecdote, support for free software is significantly better than that for proprietary software.

I do not disagree that there are people in charge of projects that shouldn’t — Dan’s example is one that has bothered me as well, in that configurability is a feature, not a bug. I also do not disagree that starting a business while trying to maintain a relationship and a home life and a current job can be a huge investment, potentially straining to the point where rivets pop out all over the place. Now that I’ve made my concessions to you, I’m willing to overlook the numerous shots you’ve taken at my open source advocacy, if you’ll just explain to me how any hobbyist’s Sourceforge page is different from any hobbyist’s iced tea stand. The point stands unmarred from the larger scale you want to put on it — if you were to start a huge project like Apache, and try to solo it (or even put together a core of programmers to do it, much like a startup with its core of founders), investing all your spare time and sacrificing time at your real job and with your relationship and other obligations, I can virtually guarantee the same strains will appear. So wherein lies the difference? Please, enlighten us.

I’ve already written software which is available one click away on my site – my protocol validator, stack ripper, backup utility, other stuff of even less consequence. It’s no Apache or Linux, certainly, but it’s more than five minutes’ worth of effort and it’s already open source.

My entire point was regarding your “Compare with a mom and pop convenience store that’s been around for about as long as your code. The size of the project and its longevity are of little import — both examples scale up equally. I’m sure each of those tools, with the amount of time and effort you put into them, took a modicum of passion, passion that could equally have been spent building a business of some sort. Since you made the example that anyone could throw together something to put onto Sourceforge and not notice that it was a failed endeavour, I felt the iced tea stand example was an apt example of a minimal-effort business with little downside, that could fail (e.g. by no buyers showing up), to correlate.

I really do hope you answer my example, since you claim to know more about both open source and business than I. If I am incorrect, please correct me. It’s edifying to me to learn that which I do not know. That’s why I hang out on science blogs despite being a computer guy.

Seriously, dude. Bingo.

“Itâ??s better to have a warped sense of humor than a warped sense of seriousness.”

Greg: I sure hope that wasn’t directed at me, because it’s a perfect example of Stephanie’s “things we weren’t even talking about” if so. I’ve been pretty darn clear about open source as a distribution model, accessibility to source being orthogonal to pricing, etc. The term “solipsistic side trip to la-la land” best applies to the unscientific misapplication of some randomly chosen psychological theories of motivation to software development.

Jason: no, I wasn’t insulted by anything about a five-minute demo. I was insulted because that’s clearly not what I was referring to. I’ve already written software which is available one click away on my site – my protocol validator, stack ripper, backup utility, other stuff of even less consequence. It’s no Apache or Linux, certainly, but it’s more than five minutes’ worth of effort and it’s already open source. Its existence alone makes me far more qualified than some to comment on open-source programmers’ motivations.

All: I have better things to do. You know, bugs and enhancements in open-source software, that kind of thing. “Conversations” with open-source zealots are about as enjoyable and productive as those with evangelists of the more familiar type. Maybe someone who actually knows something about either software or business will show up in this thread, but I no longer care.

In your haste to insult me, you’ve pretty much admitted my other point that Sourceforge is full of flotsam.

If you honestly found insulting my pointing out your strawman comparison of a five-minute Sourceforge “effort” with a legitimate business was laughable, then I apologize, though I’d advise you to realize that attacking the message is not attacking the messenger. In the meantime, the business world is littered with iced tea stand level businesses, they’re just not viewable in a centralized database like Sourceforge is. How many local businesses that went under, do you hear about on a daily basis? How about local businesses that weren’t local to you? There’s a built-in selection bias between what you hear about (the successful, or the mediocre local) and what you don’t (everything else) when it comes to the business world. On Sourceforge, the only way to filter what’s successful and what’s actually useful and continually updated, is to trust their “activity” metrics and filter accordingly. Otherwise you get the firehose of every project ever created.

Actually I have built patches for commercial OSes, notably Solaris long before it was open, but I’m not the best example.

Because you had access to the source code, I’m assuming as part of your contract with them. It may have been commercial, but the source code was available to you at a premium, so you COULD make those changes. That’s more open than MS, and led almost directly to Solaris being wholly open eventually — what part of any MS OS source code do you have access to? Regardless of how incredible of a programmer you are, unless you’re planning on dissecting and reverse-engineering the entirety of Windows using assembler, you’re not going to have the luxury of editing the code and creating a patch for any of MS’ products.

Gimp kills Calc, for instance.

Um… Greg… I don’t think they’re in direct competition. Maybe you mean Excel kills Calc (which it does, for at least a few reasons, though Calc is all I use personally and I’m finding those reasons are becoming more and more shallow); or that GIMP kills Draw? Though even Draw is more like a cross between a vector drawing program and a poor man’s Visio.