OSDev.org

Well I think the coolest thing is that some companies actually pay their employees to work on open source software. Like I read a couple of weeks ago that some company (totally forgot what it was) gave everyone a week to work on whatever they wanted and it was all open source IIRC.

pcmattman wrote:... Where would we be without open source?

Paying money for labour?

I agree with Open Source and release much of my software under open source, however i don't advocate the forced movement of Goverment Software to Open Source or the idea that all Software should be Open Source.

@abuashraf, The best way round the problem of source is good to learn from, is coders could write tut and give snipits of code to help other coders.

No, If you are an OpenSource programmer, you shouldn't be expecting to make money of course. But, most opensource programmers *enjoy* programming. Like, for me, it's a hobby. I really plan to get a Career in it, but my crappy code I make open source most of the time because

1. there is never anyway to make profit off of it anyway.(Robot AI)
2. The code needs to be portable(Open86)
3. I want to get more interest from more people (SecOS/JouleOS)
4. The language is inheritly opensource (Niche, a php CMS)
5. I never commit enough freetime to make a finished product(all of the above, excluding Niche, as I am still working on it)


ok....Open source is really like giving to charity something you like to make, and generally can't do anything with.

BSD license forever!!!

But by giving to open source your work for free, you lesson your chances of geting a job, as why should they pay you, if they can call it open source and get mugs to work for free ?
Also its been pointed out that where would OS Dev's be without open source, but you could say the same about HACKERS and hacking tools, most of these are open source.

Note: I do not say you should not show your source to others, but you should only show your source to people the have shown they want to help in your project.

But by giving to open source your work for free, you lesson your chances of geting a job, as why should they pay you, if they can call it open source and get mugs to work for free ?

I really don't think that any company would do that, unless your opensource project was really big, and even then, your opensource license should protect you in court or something...

second, I don't know of anyone who would use my source for anything really...I wouldn't program something for a company unless I was getting paid, I'd program something I *enjoy* for free, which almsot always is not what is productive...

Dex wrote:But by giving to open source your work for free, you lesson your chances of geting a job, as why should they pay you, if they can call it open source and get mugs to work for free ?

There are always companies writing proprietary software. To some, FOSS Isn't acceptable. Moreover, some require the assurance a company provides. (ie. A company like Microsoft probably isn't going to randomly close shop tomorrow.)

FOSS doesn't lower anyone's chances of getting a job. FOSS works. I don't see a point in this thread. It's like saying that turtles don't exist, even though they have been proven to.

Hi,

IMHO there's 2 types of "OpenSource"....

The first type is programmers spending large amounts of time and giving away their work for free. There's a few reasons to do this - you want people to use your code, you want to attract other developers/volunteers and can't pay them, you want something to put in job applications, you're doing it for educate/experience only, etc.

The second type is companies using open source as a marketting strategy - give the code away for free and charge people for hardware, support contracts, etc. This can be great for marketting and public image and makes it harder for other (closed source) companies to compete, because usually consumers are too dumb too see where they're paying for "free" software.

Consider Linux. People think it's free, but in reality a relatively large amount of it was/is written by commercial companies who pay programmers to write the source code. The money these companies use to pay ther programmers doesn't fall from the sky - it comes from consumers indirectly, and it's the consumers that pay for the programmers in the end.

For example, Intel wrote a variety of things for Linux (video drivers, ACPI support, etc). They charge a little extra for each CPU and chipset they sell, then pay programmers to write open source code (which helps to increase sales of their hardware later). Everyone buying Intel hardware contributes a little money towards Linux (regardless of whether or not they actually use Linux).

It's not just Intel - there's other hardware manufacturers that do the same (make people pay for free software by adding a little to the cost of hardware) - AMD, Sun, IBM, etc.

Then there's companies like Redhat. I pay a company for something (could be anything) and the company uses a small part of what I paid to pay Redhat for a support contract, then Redhat use a part of that to pay for Linux programmers. Where did the money for the programmers come from?

Consumers don't see this though - they buy things that seem unrelated and then see Linux and think it's free, not realising that they've already paid a small amount of money towards it.

Of course Linux is a mixture of commercial companies and true volunteers, which makes it good value for money for companies (they pay to do some of the work while people do the rest for free) and good value for money for consumers. However, without people paying (companies who pay) for Linux development, I doubt Linux would be where it is today.


Cheers,

Brendan

@brendan, completely agree...

I think opensource will be very important in future.
for example:
I build a new device. Now I have to write a driver for it. Ok, now the device runs with M$-Operatingsystems. Thousand's of windows-users buy this device. but ONLY windows-users.
If the sourcecode of these driver is availabal, other people can build driver for Linux, MacOS, or any hobby-OS. Now everybody buys my device. And I spend no time and mony to write hundreas of drivers.

Dex wrote:But by giving to open source your work for free, you lesson your chances of geting a job, as why should they pay you, if they can call it open source and get mugs to work for free ?

Open source developers do what they like to do, how they like to do it, at the times and deadlines they like (probably none) with no certainty whatsoever that he/she is even going to look at what people request or want.

Employers really like THEIR feature/device working, whatever it is they need and they want people who can make that happen. If you're an open source developer any technically agile manager can check your code quality before he pays you $10000 for the trial period.

Note: I do not say you should not show your source to others, but you should only show your source to people the have shown they want to help in your project.

Are you afraid of showing your code to people who are not going to help you? Why? Even people who aren't going to add code are going to contribute, if only by a "yuck" comment.

Candy wrote:

Note: I do not say you should not show your source to others, but you should only show your source to people that have shown they want to help in your project.

Are you afraid of showing your code to people who are not going to help you? Why? Even people who aren't going to add code are going to contribute, if only by a "yuck" comment.

The simple answer is, if they are not part of your team, they are your competitors .
You are compeating to be the best ?? OS, The ?? is the type of OS your making.
eg: DexOS is NOT compeating with other multi-tasking desktop OS like menuetOS or sol_os, But DexOS is compeating with OS's like this: http://www.antos-os.ca/index.html
You may have worked on some part of your OS for months, you do not want to make it easy for your competitor to rip it.

Dex wrote:But DexOS is compeating with OS's like this: http://www.antos-os.ca/index.html
You may have worked on some part of your OS for months, you do not want to make it easy for your competitor to rip it.

That depends on what your goal is. You're set out to be the best, to beat the rest, or something similar to that. I'm out to make the best OS possible, not necessarily by my hand. I also intend to make a name for myself with the code. Both are very compatible with releasing my code into the public domain, and I have done that and will do that.

We both want to achieve the same thing (eg: to make the best OS possible ), but we have chosen differant path to achieve it.

Hey man, PortixOS, the older pascal version (32bit flat mode, wow - unreal mode? Hehe ...), already supported ALL of this:

http://www.antos-os.ca/library.html

maybe except FAT and "run time linker" handling. Serial port, text handling, textwindowing and simple textmenus (like BIOS setup-ish look), were already present in my original OS. Now I'm ripping my old code from the pascal version to the assembly version of PortixOS. This can be fun, I had a triple fault, GPFs, etc...

@Dex:
Again, THANKS for the source ! But I do not know how to add the two dots (..) to that FAT entry.. well, wouldn't do the trick... Oh yeah, something bad I wrote, again ... ... This happens to me all of the time!

Regards,
inflater