Re: [-empyre-] re: who pays for open source development?

[Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@uib.no>]

At 15:32 +1100 21/2/03, Melinda Rackham wrote:
> hey tahnx everyone for the great discussion so far..
> im interrested, that in all of this no one has mentioned the underlying
> stuctures that make opensource itself or a festival like back up possible..
> (or if it was i missed it..)
>
> opensource is a fabulous  concept but i wonder bout its sustainability..and
> the financal structure or funding.. who pays for open art to be created, who
> gets paid to use opensouce software made by other people who do it for
> free.. etc etc

just a follow up to melinda's comments, and i'm sorry i haven't kept 
up with this discussion so I might be repeating what someone else has 
pointed out.

<clear throat>in academic contexts (which is what i'm familiar with) 
i'm sort of bemused by the number of said ivory tower sorts (myself 
included) who proclaim open source as 'free' and so on. however i 
would and have pointed out to these people that quite a signficant 
amount of open source development isn't actually 'free', it is state 
or institutionally subsidised. for instance all those computer 
science students or staff members who contribute to this, largely 
because a) they are in jobs that give them the time to be able to do 
this, b) they are in jobs that give them the resources to be able to 
do this (hardware, students, bandwidth).

this isn't a bad thing. in fact i think it is a rather useful way of 
spending public money since it is for the coding equivalent of 
something like publicly owned utilities, but i do think it is a 
misnomer to just call it free. </clear throat>

having said that i'm probably only basing it on one major open source 
thing i've used, which is the encore xpress moo engine, which is a 
really nice environment that has shifted moos well and truly into 
somewhere else. open source. free. but in reality almost completely 
funded by the University of Bergen and the Norwegian Research 
Council. with some kicked in by the University of Texas, Dallas.

sorry if this interrupts the thread.

cheers
adrian miles
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