Why Freeloaders Are Essential To FOSS Project Success

dp619 writes "Outercurve Foundation technical director Stephen Walli has written a blog post arguing that attracting users is fundamental to the ability of open source projects to recruit 'new blood' and contributors who are willing to code. 'So in the end, it's all about freeloaders, but from the perspective that you want as many as possible. That means you're "doing it right" in developing a broad base of users by making their experience easy, making it easy for them to contribute, and ultimately to create an ecosystem that continues to sustain itself,' he wrote."

True, sort of

[steevven1]

This is true in what it is trying to say. I started using FOSS because it was useful, not because I had any intention of contributing. Now, I regularly file bug reports and do what I can to help out and answer the questions of others. However, "freeloaders" who stay freeloaders forever are not actually necessary, except maybe that they will tell others who will end up not being freeloaders. The bottom line is: The expectation value of helpfulness for a "freeloader" is absolutely not negative.

Re:Force in numbers

[Xemu]

If your FOSS project only has a handful of users, it's nice.

If your FOSS project has thousands of users, it's good.

If your FOSS project has millions of users, it's excellent.

You have mixed up cause and effect, good Sir.

e.g

The way you wrote it: If your egg lays a millions of chickens, it's excellent.
The right way: If your chicken lays a million eggs, it's excellent.

Re:It depends on the project

[jellomizer]

The most successful FOSS projects, are infrastructure based projects.
Linux, Apache, Libraries... These general purpose tools, so a lot of people can use them to do different things.
However when you get further up and too specialized apps they will normally not do do well as FOSS because they are still complex to build however they do not have the wide use age. Thus if you need to make the product succeed you need a model where you need to pay for development.

Re:True, sort of

[CanHasDIY]

I think their point is, in any population of X freeloaders, there will be Y people who will, at some point, begin to contribute, so it's never hurtful to have a large population of X.

Plus, the bigger X gets, the bigger Y gets by proportion. Hence the "More freeloaders == more developers" ideology.

Personally, I take a bit of offense to the term 'freeloader.' If you didn't want people using the software without 'paying' in some way, either through fiscal or chronological contributions, you shouldn't be giving it away for free.

I thought that this was obvious.

[bmo]

For any amount of freeloaders, you will get people who want to fix things. This is my biggest complaint at people who dislike Ubuntu and other distros that make Linux "easy." Ubuntu and the other easy distros get fresh-meat, and eventually some of that fresh meat becomes part of the coding community.

Without fresh-meat, Linux would regress to less than a hobbyist operating system, and one pointed and laughed at as a waste of time.

The "elitists" are the ones who would eventually kill Linux.

--
BMO

I hope GiMP developers are reading this

[erroneus]

There has been a lot of flack about changes made in the 2.8.x GIMP. The developers insist "this is how it is and how it will be, no more discussion" despite the wrongness of it all. Many users wish to support the developers out of gratitude. I understand it, but I don't agree with it. People who speak out are slapped down and it doesn't matter if they have a good point or not. They just don't want to listen to their users and have said "if you're not a developer, you are not contributing, so shut up."

It's just wrong... and bad...