Where's the Money in Free Software? - Computerphile

Key Takeaways

most people make their money from uh not writing box applications but actually writing custom software and making kind of improvements of software and fixing software for other people and actually free software is a wonderful place to do that kind of work I've been doing free software for a long time previously I worked uh way way back now 10 years ago in NHS it it's the National Health Service it Project based in leads in the UK and my job there was really sort of to maintain um some free software we were using to power our website so we had um I think called plone and we were using Apache and and and Linux and gnu and and deban and all these other things to kind of make this thing happen so my job was primarily to make sure that keep that kept working to add features to it to add new functionality and to kind of maintain it and so I was paid to do that job and I left there I went to the University of Manchester and had a job that also paid me to make and maintain free software and there's kind of an overriding pattern here where I did that for a lot of my jobs um at the free software Foundation my job was more focused on campaigning I was the masterhead behind some campaigns like effective by Design uh Windows 7 Sins play O for a couple of years and so I would write articles and I would do a lot of editorial type work on those things but at the same time maintaining my own free software projects uh in my spare time and now I'm at Creative Commons and Creative Commons surprise surprise pays pays me to uh look out for free software projects and to maintain and R free software and so um if you would like to work in this kind of field I would suggest you become reasonably good at programming you know your licenses know your background and kind of have a a strong desire to make free software a reality and people need free software developers um WordPress is a great example of a very very common piece of free software that's not going away anytime soon people will always need people to write plugins help people you know be supportive um right themes write add-ons for for WordPress and if you're really good at free software development then you can even you know work on WordPress itself you know WordPress is a community project too so people need the people who work on WordPress are volunteers primarily in their spare time uh but some of them also work for the company behind WordPress and so I think the very best WordPress developers in the world get the opportunity to go and work fulltime as their paid job on WordPress so you have you have to start somewhere you don't just get a job in free software from nowhere but you can uh if you already have a job writing programming doing programming stuff uh you probably already use some free software tools see if you can convince your boss to allow you to release your changes out to the world and if you can then find the right community and give them the changes back and you could very soon find yourself doing that for a living how does it work in terms of organizing teams of developers to kind of maintain fore software the way it really works is that um if you are a developer and you enjoy a piece of software you can be part of its upkeep so generally speaking most software that's free software is developed in public using sites like Source Forge historically or nowadays things like gorus and GitHub you can go along get a copy of the code find bugs fix bugs add new features and kind of push that code that you've mained back to the main development team and general what happens is there's kind of a process whereby you you send in a few a few bug fixes a few like suggestions and then eventually after a while they get kind of like this guy's okay we'll let him into the team and then you become part of that development team if they use git for example go and check out a copy of the git code and make your changes locally but also as you make your changes check those changes into git so that you have your own version of that code locally you can kind of back and forth through it and you can kind of see what you did along the way and make when you make commits to that good git project make good comments so you kind of remember what you did uh don't just leave a oneline sarcastic response which is what I often do try and leave good comments and that way you'll kind of be able to go back in time and see what you did and then when ultimately when you eventually get those changes adopted by the big Community project they'll be able to see the same thing you can see they'll be able to see what you did and so it's not so important to structure your code super well because as long as you kind of make it work and you make good comments then that can be cleaned up afterwards look at companies like MySQL and red hat and they've made lots and lots of moneyy from doing free software stuff so you would definitely canle are one of those as well canonical does have teams developing certain pieces of free software I think the difference between konal and red hat is that red hat develops software that's generally widely used by all of free software users like gome desktop and other things whereas I think what konle does is a different model where they actually develop kind of their own free software they release it as free software but it's mostly used for the auntu community and the auntu users it's not so widely used outside of auntu but I mean that's that's not an unreasonable thing that's a you know perfectly valid way to create software you know and of course there's nothing stopping the teams at red hat and other companies and other organizations from taking the canonical code and and reusing it for other things you know so if you are going to take code from other projects and you can of course do that but you make sure that the code you take is under a license that works with the license what you're taking things into so for example if you're taking code from um WordPress you can't really take that code and put it into a project that's not under the GPL you would have a hard time wrangling that and you haven't even harder time getting your changes taken in by another project because that file would then be under at least partially under the GPL you should never let that kind of thing dissuade you from taking stuff because it's free software and it's there to be taken but at the same time you should just know the obligations that you then have um as a developer to kind of make your changes available to people so that you know when you when you you take your widget from something that's GPL you put it on the put it on the web you then have to make sure that people can get the source code to your to your changes too you can't just uh is that the share aike that's the share alike part of things exactly yeah so if you have companies that for whatever reason don't want to use free software well then take advantage of them and sell them a copy for $2,000 or $10,000 whatever you can get but the same product should be free software at the same time for those of us who are in the community that want to take it and improve it and share it