Open Source and Money

David Heinemeier Hansson, a name well-known in the Ruby on Rails world, recently wrote a blog post entitled “The perils of mixing open source and money.” In it he argues that the ability of open source contributors to raise funding through sources like Kickstarter threatens open source, though I find his arguments unpersuasive.

First he suggests that fundraising represents a one-time “cashing in on goodwill earned,” whereas I suspect that if a funded project is successful that would increase the likelihood of receiving funding for future projects and wold actually increase the goodwill directed towards the fundraiser. Second he indirectly suggests that being compensated for writing software will lead to needless embellishment, whereas I should have thought that community pressures in any decent open source developer community would lead to negative code reviews and decisions not to include needless bloat.

Hansson then goes on to suggest that working for community donations causes people to work to keep the donations coming in rather than to improve the software. The fact that many Kickstarter software projects have apparently succeeded appears to make no difference to his opinion. Sadly it seems to me that in closing he reveals that the whole piece is indeed just opinion when he says

It's against this fantastic success of social norms that we should be extraordinary careful before we let market norms corrupt the ecosystem. Like a coral reef, it's more sensitive than you think, and it's how to underestimate the beauty that's unwittingly at stake. Please tread with care.

 Doesn't Hansson know that many people who work in open source do so principally because their employers pay them to do so? And yet their acceptance of the corporate shilling is apparently not in danger of perverting the course of open source development, while people with good ideas that others are prepared to fund apparently don't qualify to receive support because they put the whole ecosystem in danger.

Either I misunderstood something or what Hansson wrote doesn't make sense. The fact of the matter is that the best open source projects don't include contributions because they have been funded, they include them because they are valuable to the project. As long as these values remain in place then the injection of money into open source projects is both desirable and useful.