The Open Source Duty

I would like to vent out some grievances against large corporations (including personally me), mostly IT giants, whose entire lines of businesses are dependent on open source software. Most of these corporations use FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) for almost everything Engineering related. They do not spend a dime on the languages, tools and frameworks that create the applications for their clients whom they charge exorbitantly.

Let’s take just one ecosystem - Java. It serves the biggest chunk of the IT application development/maintenance business, right from the language itself, to related frameworks. Let me list some tools used almost everywhere.

OS: Linux
Languages: Java
Frameworks: Struts, Spring, Hibernate, Play, JUnit, Cucumber etc.
CI/CD: Jenkins, GoCD etc.
Servers: Apache, Tomcat, JBoss
Databases: MySql, Postgres, Mongo etc.
Productivity: Libreoffice, OpenOffice etc.
…And endless other software, tools and frameworks for message queuing, machine learning etc. without which their entire IT business would be financially unsustainable. And this is only the Java Ecosystem, there are numerous others like the JavaScript, Ruby/Rails, Test frameworks etc. The breadth is staggering.

These corporations reap all the benefits of FOSS while giving back next to nothing.

In fact, when developers wish to voluntarily contribute to open source, the corporate legal teams often bring out clauses, something like “All software developed within the company and with its resources will be company’s IP exclusively in all respects, explicit or otherwise”. These are legally binding, they say.

One can only conclude that these IT corps are leeches feeding on the open source contributors and maintainers. It only makes financial sense to remember that Open Source contribution is a sort of risk hedging.

The obvious question then is how can they help. I have some pointers:

1. Allow, enable and empower engineers to contribute to open source projects. Most of the IT giants have a huge bench strength and can easily afford this.
2. Support open source movements monetarily. This might be tricky for the financially minded, but think about it, if your business depends so much on Open Source, it only makes sense in investing it for the long term. Google, Microsoft, Facebook etc. do this pretty well and are benefitting from it immensely.
3. Adopt open source projects and form teams within the company that own it. Run these teams just like any other project.
4. Be less paranoid about IP and educate Legal teams on the Open Source licensing models.
5. Host events that talk about Open Source software the companies use. There is no better way to attract engineering talent than hosting tech related events. It also helps overall reputation.

There are several other things companies and teams can do. In my next post I would like to write about what individual engineers can do for open source, after all their job depends on FOSS. Happy contributing!