Good day all. Please find below a quick note from our own code warriors, Don and Lori MacVittie on why people develop Open Source software. Enjoy. (Look for an extended, dance remix of this piece shortly.)
Open Source -- By Developers, for Developers
By Don and Lori MacVittie
why would people develop software and give it away for free? Well, there are a lot of reasons why people develop Open Source products, just like there are a lot of reasons why people do anything. But there is one over-riding reason that the business community would do well not to miss because it's indicative of a problem within their organizations.
There are almost a million open source developers on SourceForge.net alone , many who are developing software simply for recognition. They're spending their evenings and weekends writing code that their employers don't know or don't care about. They're doing it so that someone, somewhere, will say [base "]good job[per thou].
The same is true when you're a network or systems admin. No one says anything to you until a box you're responsible for is down. Everything you do is expected and taken for granted. We'd like to see most enterprises in America run for a single day with no IT staff at all. That would be bordering on hilarious, and it would be worth all the work that we'd have to do the next day to settle frazzled user's nerves.
So smile while they're screaming about the mail server, and keep your grin while they're telling you about that user interface issue in your 50,000 man-hour application. Smile because we all know the truth. They need us now. We are there and they can't get along without us. Even if they don't want to, even if they outsource IT, they're still paying for it.
