Episode Details

The costs of open sourcing a project are explored, we discover why PS4 downloads are so slow, delve into the history of UNIX man pages, and more.

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The Cost Of Open Sourcing Your Project

Accusing a company of “dumping” their project as open source is probably misplaced – it’s an expensive business no-one would do frivolously.
If you see an active move to change software licensing or governance, it’s likely someone is paying for it and thus could justify the expense to an executive.

• A Little History

Some case study cameos may help. From 2004 onwards, Sun Microsystems had a policy of all its software moving to open source. The company migrated almost all products to open source licenses, and had varying degrees of success engaging communities around the various projects, largely related to the outlooks of the product management and Sun developers for the project.
Sun occasionally received requests to make older, retired products open source. For example, Sun acquired a company called Lighthouse Design which created a respected suite of office productivity software for Steve Jobs’ NeXT platform. Strategy changes meant that software headed for the vault (while Jonathan Schwartz, a founder of Lighthouse, headed for the executive suite). Members of the public asked if Sun would open source some of this software, but these requests were declined because there was no business unit willing to fund the move.
When Sun was later bought by Oracle, a number of those projects that had been made open source were abandoned. “Abandoning” software doesn’t mean leaving it for others; it means simply walking away from wherever you left it. In the case of Sun’s popular identity middleware products, that meant Oracle let the staff go and tried to migrate customers to other products, while remaining silent in public on the future of the project. But the code was already open source, so the user community was able to pick up the pieces and carry on, with help from Forgerock.
It costs a lot of money to open source a mature piece of commercial software, even if all you are doing is “throwing a tarball over the wall”. That’s why companies abandoning software they no longer care about so rarely make it open source, and those abandoning open source projects rarely move them to new homes that benefit others.

• If all you have thought about is the eventual outcome, you may be surprised how expensive it is to get there. Costs include: For throwing a tarball over the wall:
• Legal clearance.

Having the right to use the software is not the same as giving everyone in the world an unrestricted right to use it and create derivatives. Checking every line of code to make sure you have the rights necessary to release under an OSI-approved license is a big task requiring high-value employees on the “liberation team”. That includes both developers and lawyers; neither come cheap.

• Repackaging.

To pass it to others, a self-contained package containing all necessary source code, build scripts and non-public source and tool dependencies has to be created since it is quite unlikely to exist internally. Again, the liberation team will need you