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."

Animal Farm

[AK Marc]

Orwell had a good analogy in Animal Farm. He was writing about the evolutionary process of socialism. Note, the "problem" was never the cat. It was always the pigs. The cat never caused a problem. Never harmed anyone. And didn't get in the way or drag anyone down. For whatever reason, the "freeloader" is always the enemy. But in reality, the freeloader doesn't create a load, and doesn't harm anyone. They are used by the pigs as a scapegoat, but don't themselves do any harm to anyone.

Re:More like bait and switch

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You're so wrong. The time that convinced me forever that FOSS is fantastic was when I was stuck with a weird problem with a new motherboard, and in desperation I emailed the linux-users mailing list with a plea for advice. 20 minutes later I had a reply from Alan Cox saying "Aha, just the test case I wanted: try this", with a 4 line patch that fixed my problem.
This was at 7pm on a Sunday night.

I have had "premium" contracts from Sun, Oracle, Microsoft, whoever, and I have *never* had response like this from a commercial supplier, and this has happened multiple times to me.

The great thing is, that I feel like a freeloader, so I've contributed where I can. My contributions have been tiny, but there have been many thousands of tiny contributions to FOSS projects, and whilst the tiny contributions by themselves are in no way sufficient to ensure a projects success, they do make a difference.

The 4 line patch that fixed my problem presumably fixed the same problem for hundreds of other users (most of whom probably never encountered the issue); it also helped Alan to test that the patch was worthwhile and saved *him* some bother as well. Me coming up with the problem just as Alan Cox was looking into might seem like a million to one chance, but as Terry Pratchett says, million to one chances happen all the time.