Reasons Why You Don't Contribute To Open-Source Software

[krazy]

Not to mention that there are some applications that just aren't commercially viable if open-sourced, like single-player games: would anyone have bought World of Goo if it was available under the GPL, for instance?

IMHO games are a special case when it comes to free software. They are pure entertainment, much like a movie or a musical album that people use much more 'passively'.

[RobbieAB]

Not to mention that there are some applications that just aren't commercially viable if open-sourced, like single-player games: would anyone have bought World of Goo if it was available under the GPL, for instance?

Did they sell the game, or the engine?

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is an important distinction, simply because it seems that FOSS doesn't do games very well, though it does do pretty good engines. If you think about the ideology behind FOSS, there is no reason why a company shouldn't sell a game using a GPL engine, so people can fix the engine in 10 years time when it breaks on 128bit CPUs...

Just my thoughts.

[marek]

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is an important distinction, simply because it seems that FOSS doesn't do games very well, though it does do pretty good engines. If you think about the ideology behind FOSS, there is no reason why a company shouldn't sell a game using a GPL engine, so people can fix the engine in 10 years time when it breaks on 128bit CPUs...

This fixing in "10 years time" looks like the strategy of id software.

[whizse]

This fixing in "10 years time" looks like the strategy of id software.

Yeah, it's pretty cool strategy as it let id make use of a community project, prboom, to base the official iphone release on.

[V!NCENT]

@discordian:
Well, valid point indeed! Didn't expect that 'cause I never heared of that stance before. I guess there must be a new MIT license created where it says that "This is this and that's just what it is. Code may be used in any way but damaging the entegrity of the freedom of the SOURCE CODE pool, meaning that it may not falsely be relicensed under a FREE SOFTWARE license with a different nature in such that it prohibits relicensing the SOURCE CODE back to this very license." But IANAL of course...

lol

But no, that wasn't me (for once!)

"Ofcourse... I bet it wasn't you tha-..."
-"These are not the droi- words that you were reading"

[smitty3268]

And I couldn't get back bugfixes/patches from GPL projects (unless the authors commit them back to me) thus GPL is a one-way street.

OK, first, you absolutely have the right to dislike any license you want to, and to hate on it all over the internet if you enjoy that sort of thing.

But here's what I don't get: You are explicitly choosing to license your "more liberal" licensed code so that it can be used by other licenses that are less liberal. Say you chose BSD - you've sat down and deliberately chosen to allow that code to be swallowed up by a proprietary company, or a GPL project. So then why complain afterwards? If you don't want that to happen, then you should have chosen a less liberal license to begin with. Like, say, the GPL. Or a proprietary one.

[cbh2000]

What Are My Motives?

"What are your main motives?"

I have not contributed yet (I feel I need a little more time in C++), but I feel that I have several elements that would motivate me to contribute:
1. An annoying, simple item that is "right up my alley" (I can do).
2. Donating time and effort back to the project, so that others may continue to enjoy the same high-quality software as I do.
3. A valuable experience to add into a resume.
4. Learning different concepts and methods, coding styles and acceptance.
5. Open projects have high standards; the ability to adjust and have your patches accepted makes a good programmer.

What is preventing me (right now) from contributing is I do not feel good enough; the sheer size of KDE (the one I want to contribute to) is intimidating. This movie keeps on coming to my mind whenever I think of the subject.

[Gordy]

Autoconf makes it difficult to maintain multiple simultaneous binary types. For a given source base, I want at least the following:

1. Optimized
2. Debug
3. Optimized profiling

and I want it to be the same source tree that drives all of them. Anything else is asking for referential integrity problems.

This is how I used to build binaries. It is very handy to build all three at once. It allows one to track down regressions, new bugs and identify performance issues quicker. Spend some time with autoconf/automake/configure until it does what you want. It will make your life much easier.