On Aug 10, 2010, at 6:11 PM, M. Ranganathan wrote:

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Michael Collins <msc@freeswitch.org> wrote:

On Mon, Aug 9, 2010 at 9:59 AM, Madovsky <infos@madovsky.org> wrote:

its' also an excellent way for big companies to avoid
to pay employees to make all the dev work also....

Indeed it is. Most of us in the OSS world say, "So what?" We've given our
work away for "free" in return for other considerations: free advertising,
free distribution (via Internet downloads), bragging rights, and growing a
software-based ecosystem that allows us to tap into other revenue streams
like private consulting or even writing a book. If big companies "take" our
stuff and use it then they're growing the ecosystem. The choice of OSS
licenses available to us gives us the necessary protection from large
corporations hijacking our stuff. (This includes things like CC for
documents, photos, sounds/music, etc.)

Many big companies ( IBM for example ) pay employees to contribute to
open source. I am an employee of a company that has paid me to
contribute to open source. I have also given away many of my
contributions in the past and am very glad to report that they are
alive and well. That is a terrific feeling. On the other hand, if only
I had a penny for each closed source byte I have contributed to the
big bit bucket in the sky....

Further, OSS is really the ONLY way for little guys to compete. Linux
would have never become what it is if it were a bit company closed
source project.

--
M. Ranganathan

Another perfect example of corporate contribution to open source would be FreeSWITCH itself. I am an employee of Barracuda Networks, and part of my job is to contribute to FreeSWITCH. This is also the case for some other members of the core FreeSWITCH team. We spend considerable time working on open source software, but also depend on the contributions of the community at large. Open source and corporate involvement seem to me to be a perfect match with winners on both sides. There will always be those people and companies that will try to take advantage of this without contributing back, but this is nearly impossible. There is inevitably bug reports and fixes that will come from these organizations when they have issues, or contracting revenue to some member of the community when they need help. We all contribute in some way. This is how open source ecosystems work, requiring both selfless personal and corporate involvement.

FreeSWITCH was designed from the start in both architecture and licensing to attract the most of both personal and corporate use as a way to build a larger more vibrant community of developers building a wide range of solutions. Over the last year we have seen the release of Cudatel (http://www.cudatel.com), of a book (https://www.packtpub.com/), open source web user interfaces such as 2600hz project blue.box (http://www.2600hz.org) and FusionPBX (http://www.fusionpbx.com/). Features added this year such as T.38 support, Broadsoft SCA support, and sip high availability support would all not have happened without corporate support, and FreeTDM is now maintained by Sangoma. The addition and maintenance of many freeswitch modules are now supported entirely by individuals such as mod_vmd and mod_avmd contributed by Eric des Courtis and mod_limit/hash/db by Rupa Schomaker.