Studio Rockstar

An interesting mini-debate has been going around lately which started from Lussomo’s decision to start including “sponsored links” inside their Free, Open-Source Forum Software, Vanilla. Matt Mullenweg made a short comment on the issue, as well as posing a question as to how well open-source projects are transitioning into the commercial sector. The issue fired up pretty fast once Duncan Riley posted an article on TechCrunch, How Grey Is Your Valley: Making Money From Open Source. There’s a couple interesting points in this debacle. First: how fast words can be misinterpreted online, and the impact of perceived authority (TechCrunch). Second: the issue at hand — what is ethical in making money from open source?

Perceived Authority

The first thing that really grabbed me while reading Duncan’s article and the resulting comments between him and Matt was how terribly Duncan interpreted Matt’s point of view. Duncan over-generalized Matt’s argument to “making money from open source is bad” — while Matt’s real argument was “making money from spam and leveraging open source to do so is bad.” The problem being is that since TechCrunch has around 60 billion subscribers, Duncan is given perceived authority and many people simply believed that Matt was the big bad monster in all of this.

It’s always interesting to me to watch debates on the web, since rarely do the people involved actually read what each other are saying. In any case, you really should read the comments thread — it’s provided some great entertainment for me over the past few hours.

Profit: Ethics & Open Source

Now we can get into the meat of the issue: what are the ethical limits of profiting from open source? I think this is a really tricky question — and one that’s going to need to be answered a lot in the upcoming future.

To me, I literally make my living off open source projects. Whether it be directly or indirectly, it’s no doubt that my knowledge has directly stemmed from people offering up source code for free. I use Javascript frameworks like MooTools, install Wordpress on almost all my sites, develop huge communities with Ruby on Rails, and the list goes on. As I type this post itself, I’m utilizing Camino (open source), Wordpress (open source), and even an open-source dictionary to spell-check my writing! So when asked the question whether open-source developers should make money, I think the answer is clearly yes.

But the question really is how should they be allowed to make money? I think what Lussomo did is absolutely horrible. There is no way that any open-source project should be funded but promoting a practice (casino link spam) that is actively making the internet a worse place. I won’t even accept these kinds of links on my own sites: I think they’re disgusting. Lussomo claims that the links are optional and easily removed — but that’s beside the point. It’s a downright unethical practice.

However, you can look at services like wordpress.com or Basecamp and see that there’s clearly a “white” way to make money. One in which the open source project directly benefits, and you provide a useful service, and you make money along the way.

But there’s a deeper issue that I now see — which is where does the line live? Clearly something like search engine spamming links is on the polar opposite as something like Basecamp — so how should we feel about something in-between, like adding in banner ads to a default install — or slipping in a few affiliate links here and there? To me it comes down to a question the developer needs to ask themselves: are you making the internet a better place through this action? If the answer is no, then I don’t think the open source project should move forward with the decision.

I know this post has wandered around, and really is more just a stream of my consciousness on the subject, but it’s something that I think is really important. Open source exists to make the internet a better place for you and I — and I don’t think it should be tainted by anything that promotes the opposite. Here’s to hoping Lussomo reverses their decision very soon.