Chase Phillips used to spend up to 100 hours a week writing code for the Firefox browser. Bruce Momjian, a former teacher, manages the E-mail list for contributors to the PostgreSQL database. Brian McCallister spends evenings and weekends working on projects for the Apache Software Foundation. Swedish engineer Peter Lundblad labors over Subversion, a change management system for distributed development, at night "when the children are sleeping and my wife watches TV." This spirit of volunteerism is alive and well in the world of open source software. Thousands of people donate their time and expertise to the benefit of all. But not everyone is giving as much as they're getting. Large companies, those with the greatest wherewithal to help, are surprisingly minor players in the roll-up-your-sleeves work of open source development. . Big companies are "great consumers of open source. They're very good at pushing the limits of what open source code can do," says Carl Drisko, leader of the data center consulting practice at Novell, which distributes SUSE Linux. But when it comes to pounding out code, Drisko says, "they don't have a lot of people contributing back." That's too bad. Big businesses are among the major beneficiaries of open source, as they increasingly deploy Apache, Eclipse, JBoss, Linux, MySQL, and other open source tools. It stands to reason that corporate America would be doing its share to keep things going. The talented programmers employed by big companies could speed open source projects along and raise their quality. The link for this article located at www.informationweek.com is no longer available. . The open-source software landscape is changing, marked by complex relationships between stakeholders including corporations that utilize and impact projects. Open Source Contributions, Corporate Responsibility, Software Community, Volunteerism, Open Source Development. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
Once again, the OpenBSD project is asking for donations to keep its operations in motion. It doesn't ask for much -- U.S. $100,000 (small potatoes in the operating system development industry) -- yet it provides so much to the software world. Even if you don't use OpenBSD, you're likely to be benefiting from it unknowingly. If you're using Solaris, SCO UnixWare, OS X, SUSE Linux, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux, chances are you're using the OpenBSD-developed OpenSSH for secure shell access to remote machines. If so many are using this software, why are so few paying for it? Official responses (and non-responses) from Sun Microsystems, IBM, Novell, and Red Hat are below, but if you're one of the freeloaders who hasn't contributed to OpenBSD or OpenSSH, what's your excuse? . "Bigger than OpenBSD, our big contribution is OpenSSH," OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt told me in a 2004 interview. "It is now included in pretty much every non-Windows operating system made. It is included in network switches, in half of Cisco's products, and who knows where else. It is used by everything from Arrecibo to the Greek Army to who knows where else. And what have we gotten for it in return? Pretty much nothing at all." The link for this article located at Jem Report is no longer available. . The OpenBSD team convenes to strategize on maintaining OpenSSH, vital for safe shell access on various systems.. OpenBSD Contributions, Software Development, Open Source Projects. . LinuxSecurity.com Team
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