Mom, Dad, I have something to tell you. I use FLOSS.
by Ruth Suehle
A lot of us have had the experience of having a parent who tells their friends, “My kid works with computers.” Friends nod and smile at the child’s apparent brilliance, and somebody reminisces about punch cards. Then you start working on open source projects. Mom is not so impressed. The friends are confused. You’re working for free on something you’re going to give away? “Son, I don’t understand!”
Today on his blog, Stephen Walli explains the economics of open source. It certainly doesn’t explain all of the motivations and mechanics of open source projects, but it’s a start. Send it to your mom.
Individual projects behave as markets from one perspective, and code is currency, the medium of exchange. Just like all economic exchanges, the contributor offers something they value less (a fragment of code solving a particular need) for something they value more (the functioning software package in its entirety). Nobody is working for free in an economic sense.
And if turns out that Mom really digs the idea once she understands it, you can send her to Open Source God, a recently posted list of open source projects for all your software needs. There are a million of those lists, but this is one of the best I’ve seen.
