Money and Who Makes It Is ...

By Mark Hall

August 15, 2005 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - ... a sensitive issue in the open-source community. According to Mitchell Baker, president of the Mozilla Foundation in Mountain View, Calif., "Anytime money gets into the picture, people get suspicious." Baker was explaining to an audience of open-source
developers at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland, Ore., earlier this month why she feels her nonprofit organization needs a for-profit sister company to promote and manage the world's No. 2 Internet browser, Firefox.
The money problem inside the open-source world stems from the fact that most developers who contribute to open-source projects do so for free, while some individuals build successful companies around those projects and profit from them. Paul Everitt, executive director of the Plone Foundation in Houston, which promotes the Plone open-source content management software, says, "If you want to attract developers, you can't give off the smell that someone's going to make a lot of money" while leaving the developers in the cold.


Winston Damarillo, CEO of Simula Labs LLC

Mike Shaver, the Mozilla Foundation's technology strategist, says those views helped shape the structure of the new Mozilla Corp. so it would own no assets and, despite its for-profit status, would be unlikely to earn a dime. "Everything we do is for the [Mozilla] community," he says.
Winston Damarillo, CEO of Simula Labs LLC, a venture capital business that nurtures open-source companies, acknowledges that there's "a little bit" of resentment among some open-source programmers. Damarillo, who recently sold open-source application server firm Gluecode Software Inc. in El Segundo, Calif., to IBM , proudly says, "We produced a few open-source millionaires." But he stresses that his goal is to offer the "inner core [of developers] of an open-source project to be co-founders" of the companies that Simula Labs will launch.


	Zach Urlocker, vice president of marketing at MySQL Inc.

Zach Urlocker, vice president of marketing at the leading open-source database company, MySQL Inc. in Cupertino, Calif., claims that open-source developers "are less extremist today." Still, he says it is essential for MySQL "to err on the side of overcommunicating" the company's goals to developers to deflect any resentment that the company makes money. In addition, says CEO Marten Mickos, MySQL pays for key pieces of code developed by contributors to its database.
Damarillo argues that people in the open-source community have much to offer the IT industry. "The biggest loss for open-source is if developers become salaried employees instead of entrepreneurs," he says.
Open-source code can pose legal ...
... headaches for IT departments if they don't carefully manage the Byzantine licensing requirements.

Recommend Digg Twitter ShareThis

Email Print Send Feedback Reprints

Additional Resources

POLL RESULTS

Leading IT Pros Weigh In on Top IT Issues

Accelerate your knowledge of the IT world you inhabit by viewing the results of a series of polls taken by your IT peers. These polls of 100+ IT professionals each are available for full viewing. They cover key topics such as virtualization, processor performance, green IT, cloud computing and many others. Be a part of the buzz.

WHITE PAPER

For Best Results, Think Beyond the Box

Technology is complex. Keeping it running productively shouldn't be. To that end, you want to minimize the number of solutions needed in-house to simplify operations, maintenance, and support. Kodak offers a best-practices model. One company provides support for both scanner and software, for fast problem resolution without vendor finger-pointing. Download now!

WHITE PAPER

Accelerating the Path to Demand Intelligence with a Demand Signal Repository

Utilizing demand intelligence improves the precision of pricing, product assortments, channel/store placement, and promotion, which are all essential for sustainable revenue management performance. Learn more, download this free whitepaper today.

White Papers & Webcasts

Sustaining SOX Compliance: Best Practices to Mitigate Risk, Automate Compliance, and Reduce Costs
Since the adoption of SOX, much has been learned about IT compliance. Discover how to make SOX efforts more effective in "Sustaining Sox...

Why Compliance Pays
This OnDemand webcast explores the relationship that firms with best compliance records have higher revenue, greater customer retention, lower financial losses from data...

IDC White Paper: CCM for IT Compliance and Risk Management
Learn from industry analysts how IT organizations are using configuration management to meet compliance requirements and instill best practices. Find out how these...

Best Practices for Managing Business Risks from the Use of IT
(Source: Symantec) Based on exhaustive benchmarks conducted by the IT Policy Compliance, this session highlights the relationship between business risks and use of...

Keep it Clean: Maintaining the Integrity of your CMDB through Change Detection
Learn how configuration drift can challenge configuration management database (CMDB) integrity and how a configuration audit tool and an effective change management process...

Managing And Protecting Your Ever Increasing Mobile Assets
(Source: Absolute Software) Your users are becoming more mobile each day. This is great for productivity - yet challenging for IT control. Natalie...

The Tripwire HIPAA Solution: Meeting the Security Standards Set Forth in Section 164
HIPAA requires businesses that handle personal health information (PHI) to set up strong controls to ensure the security and integrity of that information....

Sun OpenSSO Enterprise Webinar
(Source: Sun) This webinar replay discusses Sun OpenSSO Enterprise innovation--the single, open-source solution that helps your business solve the challenges around internal access...

Configuration Assessment: Choosing the Right Solution
Configuration assessment lets businesses proactively secure their IT infrastructure and achieve compliance with important industry standards and regulations. Learn why configuration assessment is...

Agile Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for Rapid ROI
(Source: IBM) Content rich business processes are a core feature of daily operations at just about any organization today. Very often these essential...

All White Papers | All Webcasts