On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 09:44:00AM -0700, Jack J. Woehr wrote: > A professional peer of mine wrote the following article: > > http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/23417 > > which contains the following paragraph: > > Google's hired great open source developers from projects like > Linux, Firefox, Samba and Apache. > They all still have ties back into those projects. Now these key > hires can help influence open source > development projects that happen to indirectly benefit Google. Plus, > open source developers would > love to help improve their projects and displace Microsoft. A win-win. > > I'd like to ask the community what they think: Is the hiring of open > source star coders in expectation of > ancillary benefit from their influence in Open Source projects a win-win > form of "voting with your > feet" or is it an ethical conflict? I'm curious how we all see this. >
I see it as reality. I'm sure that lots of organizations which are impacted by what the open source (and free-source) communites do (i.e. what decisions they make) will hire people from those communities to do two things: If they're hoping to be interoperable with future open projects, yet they want the solution faster than may happen if the community were left alone, they may hire someone to work on it. Imagine if, before OpenSSH had been developed, a large networking company needed something like what OpenSSH became and wanted it to be open so that their product would interoperate. They may hire someone who was working on it in their spare time. This kind of hiring directly benefits them but also the wider community. There's also the subversion class of hiring where, if they can't infiltrate the community with one of their own, they would try to "turn" a member of the community. So, I suppose, as always, when one is inclined to take the advice of someone on a major decision, it is prudent to look at their motivation and their background; who they are working for. Above-the-board hiring practices are fair and mutually beneficial. Subversive practices are best documented and publisised. Doug.
