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A profitable Linux Desktop distro?A profitable Linux Desktop distro?Posted Nov 19, 2008 22:05 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)In reply to: A profitable Linux Desktop distro? by nix Parent article: Mandriva reports its 3rd Quarter results
The lesson.... even NASA colors reality in their press materials. So if you are only looking at statements made to the press and there is no transparency beyond that into details you really don't know what reality is. And depending on which press materials you see.. the Sun maybe red, green or blue...but sadly seldom purple.
Transparency matters. It matters to government. It matters to publicly funded science. It matters to publicly traded companies. It matters to volunteer organizations. It matters to pretty much any situation where a small group of people are asking a much larger group of people to trust in their ability to manage shared resources and interests. Forget legal requirements... ethically and morally transparency matters. Who are your stakeholders and are you reporting to them on a timely, forthright and accurate basis concerning your ability to manage shared resources?
For publicly traded companies those stakeholders are the shareholders. Obviously. And in fact society has recognized that and created all sorts of protections and requirements to make sure companies meet a minimum standard of performance with regard to reporting.
For community based projects those stakeholders are contributors. What sort of reporting requirements should we demand in this case?
When business entities engage in the management of community volunteers, their ability to manage those contributor resources and interests can only be quantified when their is an appropriate level of transparency between the business entities resource planning as it relates to that community of contributors.
What is our standard for that? What do we expect of business entities who engage in this sort of community sheparding? There or so many companies now who are growing their own contributor communities. Who's really engaging in best practises with regard to resource planning in consultation with those communities?
So on Mandriva's part they are compelled by law as a publicly traded company to provide a minimum level of financial transparency to stockholders. I wonder if they go beyond what is strictly legally required as a publicly traded company as they relate to their volunteer contributor community. Are stockholders the only group that a company which is relying in part on volunteer contribution the only stakeholders that you have an ethical obligation to provide status reports to? Does Mandriva as a company do any publicly communicated budget or resource planning for aspects of their business which directly interact with contributor community building and asking for feedback about how those resources are allocated from the contributor-base? I don't know. I've failed to find references to that sort of thing.
On Canonical's part...they aren't even legally compelled to do any financial status reporting to stockholders. So even that level of transparency is missing. But obviously Canonical spends and budgets money
-jef
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A profitable Linux Desktop distro? Posted Nov 19, 2008 22:27 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
why should you know?
in a public company shareholders need to know so that they can tell if their money is being spent the way they want it to, the public needs to know so that they can decide if they should spend their money buying a share of the company or not.
for a private company you have no reason other then curiosity and the desire to second-guess and criticize the owner.
you may claim that you want to know so that you can tell if the business is going to run out of money and shut down or not, but in a private company with a large, rich sponsor you can't know that unless you know the mindset and personal finances of that sponsor (and in this case, since you have publicly called that sponsor a lier why would you believe any statement of his mindset anyway)
so there's no reason for a private company to provide the information that you are asking for. (I don't believe that RedHat did it before going public either, so it's not just those evil ubuntu people refusing to give you the information.
A profitable Linux Desktop distro? Posted Nov 19, 2008 22:48 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Time is money isn't it?
A volunteer contributor's time is a valuable resource isn't it? Something worth cultivating, something worth making use of? How valuable is it for any project? If we tried to account for all that time and turned it into an in-kind expenditure report.. what would that number look like? If a business had to pay someone for all the work their community volunteers do..how big a number would that be? How is all that community effort not an investment worthy of responsible status reporting?
And why do you insist on using the word "Ubuntu" where the word "Canonical" makes more sense?
-jef
A profitable Linux Desktop distro? Posted Nov 19, 2008 23:20 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
there is not a single origination in the world that accounts for volunteer hours and turn them into expense reports. it's just not worth the effort.
as for typing "Ubuntu" instead of "Canonical", it's shorter and close enough to the same meaning
A profitable Linux Desktop distro? Posted Nov 19, 2008 23:47 UTC (Wed) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I think you are wrong. I think there are a number of examples of incorporated organizations which make it a habit of documenting the financial worth of in-kind contributions of all sorts...including time.
Typically those sorts of organizations which make significant use of volunteers are non-profit...and there are compelling tax based incentives to want to make sure that sort of in-kind contribution of services is documented. And generally speaking there are reporting requirements for non-profits. Now of course, the rules of of in-kind contribution reporting are squishy.. but efforts are made to account for it when its deemed appropriate.
What we are seeing now in open source project management... is a pretty new model in how private business rely on a large volunteer contributor base. There are no established baseline rules for this sort of thing as to what is expected. Up till now for-profit business entities have typically been expected to deal with labor, investors and consumers....not a large contributor pool who are both a significant portion of your labor and also your consumers. We simply don't know what the best practise rules are. How do we know if the managing entity is taking advantage of their contributor base? We've no baseline standard of performance when it comes to expectations on business and contributor relations. Time to unionize.
-jef
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