Tarkblog

I got an email last night from Sourceforge (a large online host for “free” software projects, for those of you who don’t follow such things) is now offering a service to their hostees in that they are going to provide the ability for people who use the software to recommend and pay for adding services and features to it. Basically, for people who write open source software this could be a huge thing - getting paid for adding features to their software based on the desires of the people who use it.

Last year, I was in a position of need like this. We make heavy use of phpmyadmin internally to download data from MySQL databases. It’s much easier than trying to write our own, even though we need something a little more focused and specific. But I had the need for a certain type of feature, albiet small. It was something that I think would have also benefited phpmyadmin. So I sent an e-mail making the request and asking if there were any developers who would be interested in doing such a project. Not only did I offer financial compensation, I asked whomever was interested to name their price or rate.

I got back a terse response from one of the project leaders basically saying that nobody is interested and to go away. Interesting. Nobody was interested in adding a feature to a piece of software AND getting paid for it? Both of us lost on that deal.

Contrast that to ZeroC, the makers of another piece of software we utilize. Their work is also available for “free” and is open source; and they follow a big model of “we’ll add whatever features you want if you’re willing to pay for them”. We’ve supported a number of projects and products with them over the past few years. It’s helped both of us; they get to add the features into the software that they distribute and sell licenses for; we get the features we need to make the software do what we want. It’s win-win-win.

I hope the phpmyadmin folks take this opportunity at sourceforge, where I think they’re still hosted, to look for ways to expand their product while being compensated.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 5:39 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.