Daniel Hardy

Jeff Atwood recently wrote a great article about how he gave a small open source project $5000 with no strings attached.  To his surprise 4 months later the money hadn’t been touched.  To me this is a great example of how open source is often about the love and not about the money.

The comments section was of course filled with numerous suggestions of how the developers should have spent the money.  One theme that stood out to me was to spend the money on hiring a graphic designer to come in and update the look of their site or perhaps a marketing firm to help them get the word out.

This really resonated with me as I have been contemplating why so few designers donate their time and energy to free products.  It is intriguing that so many great developers are willing to give up their free time to create amazing products while there appears to be a dramatic shortage of designers, marketers, technical writing, and other “support”(for lack of better term) personnel willing to donate their time.

Is it because only developers are using the products?  This certainly isn’t the case considering some of the greatest applications out there are open source.  Perhaps instead it is because the products these professionals are currently using are not opens source.

Perhaps more important than dwelling on why there is a shortage we should be looking for a solution.  I have on many occasions made comments to friends and colleagues about perhaps supporting an open source product by creating a comp, or giving them usability advice.

With that in mind I am guilty of not contributing as much as I should.  Most of my digital exsitence is now dependent on open source products and as of late I have not been contributing.

Everyday it seems like I hear about another company pushing a new Open Source agenda. Today Download Squad had a great article about Reddit going opensource.

This is an amazing step for a web site.  To my knowledge no other popular site has opened their codebase on this level.  Sure there are lots that have open API’s but this is a very very different thing than letting someone access your data through a cloaked application layer.

Instantly closed source proponents have deemed this an ill fated move on the basis that anyone can now read the rating algorithm and there by diminish the sites value by “gaming” the system.  I disagree whole heartedly with this idea.  Sure people will try to deconstruct the algorithm and utilize it for their nefarious agendas but the community will respond quickly by writing a better algorithm.

A great example of this principal can be seen with Linux.  Every piece of code in the operating system is available to anyone who wants it yet it continues to be the most secure operating system out there.  Perhaps Firefox is a better example as it hits close to home and has a large user base(according to the W3schools.com it has almost 40% market share ).  Again anyone can review the code and find exploits.  This happens all the time but because there are 100’s of eyes reviewing the code these exploits are fixed almost immediately by the community.

Overall I think this is a great move on Reddit’s part.  I also believe we will continue to see a large increase in the number of organizations deciding that Open Source is a viable business model.