Cool! Its really cool….

It is interesting that you articulate a difference between Kernel devs and “the rest” of the FLOSS community. I hadn’t really considered that kind of separation before. But thinking about it now you are almost certainly bang-on the nail. Thinking about the comments I read on various mailing lists, a great deal of the core stuff: Kernel, Glibc and GCC do seem to be handled by RH, Novell and the other big players… Good point!

But the overall conclusions we both agree on – “which is nice…”

Cheers

Alan

On the one hand, you have Linux, where there are a great number of people who support and enhance the various flavors (and the kernel itself) SPECIFICALLY as their day jobs — because there are actually companies who are making money off of supporting Linux! Imagine that. For example:

http://port25.technet.com/archive/2007/05/15/clarifications.aspx
Most customers who use Linux, use a distribution like Red Hat or Ubuntu or SuSE and that although there are certainly a lot of developers who work for free, most of the people who do the daily work on the Linux kernel are paid to do so. Typically they are paid by IT companies who have a commercial interest in Linux. This isn’t FUD, it’s reality (Corbet from LWN did a great analysis of this here citing “at least 65% of the code which went into 2.6.20 was created by people working for companies”).

People act like it’s a bad thing, to get paid to write Linux code. It’s not. It’s fantastic. Free software can make money.

And then when you expand the argument to ALL open source software, you have something like Eric Raymond’s discussion about people who write commercial versus in-house software:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s03.html
When I speak at technical conferences, I usually begin my talk by asking two questions: how many in the audience are paid to write software, and for how many do their salaries depend on the sale value of software. I generally get a forest of hands for the first question, few or none for the second, and considerable audience surprise at the proportion.

And he’s right — most of us professional software developers write very little code (if any) that is ever sold on the open market. We write code that no one ever sees, to support internal processes.

The notion that “the people writing open source software are the ones who are making their daytime living working for a proprietary-solutions vendor and spend their nights tearing down the very house they live in” is just plain wrong. A very small percentage of programmers work for a “proprietary-solutions vendor” at all, much less in a capacity that creates saleable software. Most of the people writing open source software seem to be either (A) people who get paid to write open source software like Linux or MySQL, or (B) people who get paid to write code that will never be seen outside the walls of their company.

Sorry for the long comment. Love the blog. Nice job.

- Julian