A Free Software Experiment

by on September 18, 2007 · 12 comments

It will be fascinating to see how well this works. Mozilla has created a for-profit subsidiary that will work on improving Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client.

The danger, it seems to me, is that once you’ve got $3 million burning a hole in your pocket, there’s a serious danger that the characteristics that make the free software model viable in the first place—lack of bureaucracy, community enthusiasm, relentless focus on users—will be undermined. The paid employees can begin to see themselves as “running” the project, as opposed to facilitating the collaborative efforts of community members. In a traditional open source project, the only things that get done are the things that somebody is passionate enough to do themselves. On the other hand, in a traditional for-profit company, the product gets the features the CEO thinks the product should have, whether or not anyone else wants those features. Trying to mix the two approaches could be poisonous in an effort in which the bulk of the manpower is still provided by volunteers.

Still, it’s a worthy experiment. And the guy they picked to run it seems like a smart guy who may have the combination of good judgment and humility to pull it off. With the Mozilla Foundation sitting on tens of millions of dollars, they can certainly afford to experiment. Free software is a new enough phenomenon that there’s still a lot to be learned about when and how it can be combined with more traditional top-down management styles.

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About Tim Lee

Timothy B. Lee (Contributor, 2004-2009) is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. He is currently a PhD student and a member of the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. He contributes regularly to a variety of online publications, including Ars Technica, Techdirt, Cato @ Liberty, and The Angry Blog. He has been a Mac bigot since 1984, a Unix, vi, and Perl bigot since 1998, and a sworn enemy of HTML-formatted email for as long as certain companies have thought that was a good idea. You can reach him by email at leex1008@umn.edu.

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  • http://www.manifestdensity.net Tom

    As with so many things, I suspect its success will be determined by the people rather than the arrangement. After all, Linus Torvalds draws a salary for maintaining Linux; so do the maintainers of Samba, I believe. And of course Mozilla’s had a lot of money for a while now, as you note. There are more corporate sponsors of prominent open source contributors than you might think — enough that you’ll occasionally hear it argued that open source is a crock, that the movement is just marketing. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s true that a lot of FOSS superstars end up getting paid to do what they do. Their projects continue to accept patches from the community, and their technical direction doesn’t generally change.

    But it’s true that those projects are more often related to low-level drivers and servers than consumer products. And the history of open source GUI mail clients is littered with failures, so I can’t say I’m betting on these guys (although I’m certainly rooting for them).

  • http://linuxworld.com/community/ Don Marti

    Most open source programmers are working “on the clock” by now. Hobbyist contributors are not drawing a salary either because they’re still building expertise and reputation (like college football players) or they just like their day jobs better.

    The real problem here is: what’s the business model for a mail client? Web browsers are a cash cow since you can sell the default search engine setting. This has brought Mozilla $50 million or so. But what’s the thing you use a free mail client to sell? I suppose you could offer users a “report spam” button, and charge antispam vendors for fresh spam reports, but what else?

  • http://www.techliberation.com/ Tim Lee

    Most of the people working on Linux may be “on the clock” somewhere, but they don’t get their paycheck from Linux Torvalds. So “volunteers” probably isn’t the right word to use, but from an organizational perspective, most open source projects are volunteer efforts in the sense that their leaders aren’t paying the salaries of most of the people contributing. Which means that unlike traditional for-profit companies, the leaders of open source projects typically don’t really get to decide what the other developers work on, because each developer has his own priorities set either by his own interests or the company that pays his salary.

  • http://www.manifestdensity.net Tom

    As with so many things, I suspect its success will be determined by the people rather than the arrangement. After all, Linus Torvalds draws a salary for maintaining Linux; so do the maintainers of Samba, I believe. And of course Mozilla’s had a lot of money for a while now, as you note. There are more corporate sponsors of prominent open source contributors than you might think — enough that you’ll occasionally hear it argued that open source is a crock, that the movement is just marketing. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s true that a lot of FOSS superstars end up getting paid to do what they do. Their projects continue to accept patches from the community, and their technical direction doesn’t generally change.

    But it’s true that those projects are more often related to low-level drivers and servers than consumer products. And the history of open source GUI mail clients is littered with failures, so I can’t say I’m betting on these guys (although I’m certainly rooting for them).

  • http://linuxworld.com/community/ Don Marti

    Most open source programmers are working “on the clock” by now. Hobbyist contributors are not drawing a salary either because they’re still building expertise and reputation (like college football players) or they just like their day jobs better.

    The real problem here is: what’s the business model for a mail client? Web browsers are a cash cow since you can sell the default search engine setting. This has brought Mozilla $50 million or so. But what’s the thing you use a free mail client to sell? I suppose you could offer users a “report spam” button, and charge antispam vendors for fresh spam reports, but what else?

  • http://www2.blogger.com/profile/14380731108416527657 Steve R.

    Tom: Unless one is independently wealthy, we all need a source of income. I don’t have an issue with those working on LINUX getting paid. The important point is that the product is unencumbered, based on open standards, and freely available to the public.

    As to the history of open source being littered with failure? What’s the point? This is a false argument since every private for profit company has a cemetery full of failures. Some examples of failed products include the Edsel, New Coke, Betamax, and certain Sony/BMG CDs (Sony rootkit). A coming failure will be in the HDDVD format war will the winner/loser be either Blue-ray or HD-DVD? Only time will tell.

  • http://www.techliberation.com/ Tim Lee

    Most of the people working on Linux may be “on the clock” somewhere, but they don’t get their paycheck from Linux Torvalds. So “volunteers” probably isn’t the right word to use, but from an organizational perspective, most open source projects are volunteer efforts in the sense that their leaders aren’t paying the salaries of most of the people contributing. Which means that unlike traditional for-profit companies, the leaders of open source projects typically don’t really get to decide what the other developers work on, because each developer has his own priorities set either by his own interests or the company that pays his salary.

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/ enigma_foundry

    This is part of a general expansion of the NFP sector, and it’s already happened with Samba and Gentoo. Gentoo’s been a a foundation for a couple of years now, I believe.

    Perhaps of interest here:

    http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2007/03/07/not-your-fathers-thousand-points-of-light/

  • http://www2.blogger.com/profile/14380731108416527657 Steve R.

    Tom: Unless one is independently wealthy, we all need a source of income. I don’t have an issue with those working on LINUX getting paid. The important point is that the product is unencumbered, based on open standards, and freely available to the public.

    As to the history of open source being littered with failure? What’s the point? This is a false argument since every private for profit company has a cemetery full of failures. Some examples of failed products include the Edsel, New Coke, Betamax, and certain Sony/BMG CDs (Sony rootkit). A coming failure will be in the HDDVD format war will the winner/loser be either Blue-ray or HD-DVD? Only time will tell.

  • http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com eee_eff

    This is part of a general expansion of the NFP sector, and it’s already happened with Samba and Gentoo. Gentoo’s been a a foundation for a couple of years now, I believe.

    Perhaps of interest here:

    http://enigmafoundry.wordpress.com/2007/03/07/n…

  • http://www.pc-hot.com Free Download

    From this experiment we all benefit, Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client is a powerful software. Don’t get this wrong but I don’t care how much they earn as long I’m not paying for it.

  • http://www.pc-hot.com Free Download

    From this experiment we all benefit, Mozilla’s Thunderbird mail client is a powerful software. Don’t get this wrong but I don’t care how much they earn as long I’m not paying for it.

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