Producing Open Source Software

Chapter 5. Money

This chapter examines how to bring funding into a free software environment. It is aimed not only at developers who are paid to work on free software projects, but also at their managers, who need to understand the social dynamics of the development environment. In the sections that follow, the addressee (“you”) is presumed to be either a paid developer, or one who manages such developers. The advice will often be the same for both; when it’s not, the intended audience will be made clear from context.

Corporate funding of free software development is not a new phenomenon. A lot of development has always been informally subsidized. When a system administrator writes a network analysis tool to help him do his job, then posts it online and gets bug fixes and feature contributions from other system administrators, what’s happened is that an unofficial consortium has been formed. The consortium’s funding comes from the sysadmins’ salaries, and its office space and network bandwidth are donated, albeit unknowingly, by the organizations they work for. Those organizations benefit from the investment, of course, although they may not be institutionally aware of it at first.

The difference today is that many of these efforts are being formalized. Corporations have become conscious of the benefits of open source software, and started involving themselves more directly in its development. Developers, too, have come to expect that really important projects will attract at least ...