A couple days back, I had the chance to talk to the senior director of software development of one of the fastest growing private companies in the US. Offering
Software as a Service, the company uses lots of libraries but mainly MySQL and Java on the back-end and Apache and PHP to generate the presentation, nothing really surprising or out of the ordinary, I guess. The conversation was kind of boring until the senior director suddenly mentioned, "You know, we are heavily invested into open source" and one of his software development manager concurred, "We are really committed to open source, no really, we are."
Hmm,
heavily invested and really committed to open source, right! Guess what this fast growing company had contributed, how many lines of code and how many person-hours of engineering time it had donated? Yes, you guessed correctly: nothing, zero lines, and not a single hour.
No monetary donation to any open source project was ever made, no single bug report to an open source project was ever submitted, not even a single feature request was ever sent.
"Heavily invested and really committed to open source " just sounds so much better than "being a freeloader that grows his business like crazy thanks to those code-monkeys that make all this cool and virtually bug-free software available under the BSD or Apache license ".
By no means am I against open-soure. In fact, I am the founder and principal developer of the Swixml XUL Engine, an open-source, Apache-licened library, available here
swixml.org and here
java.net. (Graphical User Interfaces are described in XML documents that are parsed and rendered into javax.swing objects at runtime.)
Neither do I think that everyone benefitting from an open-source project needs to give back to the community, (it certainly would be nice though). However, the meaning of "heavily invested and really committed to open source" should really mean some deeper involvement.
Wouldn't it be cool if senior directors and software development managers would proudly state to be really committed to open source and also put some money and resources to where their mouth is?