The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

[Posted September 6, 2018 by corbet]

The Harvard Business School's "Working Knowledge" site has an article arguing that it can pay for companies to allow their developers to contribute back to the projects whose software they use. "And that presents an interesting dilemma for firms that rely heavily on open source. Should they allow employees on company time to make updates and edits to the software for community use that could be used by competitors? New research by Assistant Professor Frank Nagle, a member of the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, shows that paying employees to contribute to such software boosts the company’s productivity from using the software by as much as 100 percent, when compared with free-riding competitors."

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 6, 2018 18:43 UTC (Thu) by sjfriedl (✭ supporter ✭, #10111) [Link]

This is no surprise to me. Most of the open source software improvements that might help a competitor are too general in nature to really be giving the other guys a competitive advantage.

For instance, if Lyft contributed Linux kernel or PHP or Apache or whatever fixes, the benefit to Lyft of having that improved expertise far exceeds the general benefit to competitor Uber.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 6, 2018 21:42 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link] (13 responses)

Even having to debate it seems so farcical. If you're worried about people who "do the same thing", the software they use is not the main differentiator. How your company is organized, how you treat your people and your customers, how you organized projects etc are huge, and software is ultimately minor. Fixes and changes to software? Incredibly minor.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 6, 2018 21:56 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

Perhaps this is too dismissive, as there is the part about letting your programmers do their job to the best of their ability. That seems pretty big.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 6:48 UTC (Fri) by danielpf (guest, #4723) [Link] (8 responses)

It depends heavily on the type of activity of the company. If the software makes directly the difference with competitors (like for a mainly software-based company) it seems obvious that the company would not want to be suicidal by opening its software products.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 8:37 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (7 responses)

But it's not talking about releasing the company's own software as free software, but about contributing patches upstream to free software that you use. (The line between the two is fuzzy in some places, but it is there.)

Plenty of companies contribute actively to free software and at the same time have their own internal programs and algorithms which they guard closely.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 10:48 UTC (Fri) by danielpf (guest, #4723) [Link] (6 responses)

There is no clear line between general interest software and specific software. Take for example
companies like Intel or PGI developing C/C++/Fortran compilers. In such cases it was perhaps
profitable for some time to sell such products, but by now my guess is the majority of users prefer
free software even if less performing by a substantial margin.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 11:56 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

I was thinking of examples like Google, where they contribute to Linux, but at the same time their internal search algorithm is secret. It's not so much whether the software is general purpose vs special purpose; more about whether it is an existing free software project that comes from outside the company vs. the company's internally developed proprietary code. That is usually a line you can draw. (So for Intel, they have contributed patches to gcc and at the same time developed their own proprietary compilers.)

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 13:28 UTC (Fri) by sjfriedl (✭ supporter ✭, #10111) [Link] (3 responses)

> There is no clear line between general interest software and specific software

Sure there is: the line is whether that "general interest" software is related to what the company sells, and most companies don't sell software at all.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 9, 2018 10:41 UTC (Sun) by mfuzzey (subscriber, #57966) [Link] (2 responses)

If the free software is related to what the company sells but does not compete with it that is probably a very good reason to contribute to that free software.
That is often the case with hardware companies. Intel, AMD, NXP etc all have very good reasons for wanting linux to run well on their chips so they contribute.

For the intel compiler case I'm not sure their primary reason for selling a proprietary compiler is to make money (even if they do make money from compiler sales once R&D costs are deducted it's likely to be peanuts compared with chip sales). It's probably more about providing a solution for those that need every last drop of performance so they stay on intel hardware. Of course most people don't really care about absolute performance (in execution speed of the compiled code, size of the compiled code or compile time) but just if it is good enough for their use case. If your workload runs in 50ms even a 5x speed up probably isn't important. Once a free software compiler is good enough for your use case other advantages such as lack of licensing "hassle" becomes more important (for most companies actually paying license fees isn't the main problem for proprietary software its more about the administration, especially if things like license servers are involved).

In cases where the free software is unrelated to the companies direct business but is used internally as an enabler (eg webservers or frameworks) contributing can still make sense as a way of reducing maintenance costs by getting your modifications merged upstream. But most non tech companies don't have the in house skills to do this. And although they could hire contractors to do it, unless they are specifically asked to contribute back by their client most won't. Cynics would say it's in the contractors best interest to redo the same thing several times rather than merging it back upstream.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 9, 2018 14:21 UTC (Sun) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link] (1 responses)

My impression is that the major reasons for Intel's compiler are benchmarketing and partially freeing their microarchitects from performing well on code generated by other compilers:

If there is some architectural or microarchitectural feature (or pitfall) of their next CPU that benefits from compiler support, they can build it into their compiler, and, e.g., SPEC CPU results of that CPU will look good. If they can convince game studios to use their compiler, the all-important game benchmark results will also look good.

Showing a compiler that produces good code for the new CPU will also motivate other compiler maintainers to produce better code for the new CPU.

There are also reports of switches in compiler-generated code or Intel libraries that check for GenuineIntel CPUs, and use specially optimized code when a GenuineIntel CPU is present, and some other code for other CPUs. Of course, if you have that, you don't provide this software as free software, or your competitors could easily fix this particular check.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 9, 2018 16:24 UTC (Sun) by excors (subscriber, #95769) [Link]

> There are also reports of switches in compiler-generated code or Intel libraries that check for GenuineIntel CPUs, and use specially optimized code when a GenuineIntel CPU is present, and some other code for other CPUs.

https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49 has some details on that from a decade ago. I don't know whether anything has changed since then. That article says you can still easily fix that check by replacing the (undocumented) dispatcher function with your own code; the main problem is just that it's not obvious you need to do that.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 10, 2018 6:25 UTC (Mon) by gfernandes (subscriber, #119910) [Link]

There's always a clear line of separation.

That separation can be seen in "infrastructure" software, and "business domain" software.

You're _never_ going to write your own compiler. It doesn't make business sense. You can however _contribute_ compiler code that opportunitie optimises specific behaviour, to the upstream, open source compiler project.

That's what this article is about: contributing to *upstream* _opensource_ software that you're _already_ using.

It's not about open sourcing your _business domain_ software.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 11:54 UTC (Fri) by hkario (subscriber, #94864) [Link] (2 responses)

it is "obvious" to people that work on OSS, but having a systemic study show the same thing is how you turn anecdote into knowledge

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 15:48 UTC (Fri) by tpo (subscriber, #25713) [Link]

so very much +1 for this one

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 19:52 UTC (Fri) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

This study shows that individual engineers have improved effciency when permitted to contribute, which is great.

However, prior research and results already existed for many decades showing what aspects of businesses have major changes in results which already told you that this wasn't an area to worry about.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 9:03 UTC (Fri) by darwish (guest, #102479) [Link] (3 responses)

Ironically, the research paper link in the article only shows the abstract and asks you to pay 30$ for the full PDF.

Here is another link with the full PDF available: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3091831

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 11:51 UTC (Fri) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link] (2 responses)

Cool.

Another general tip is to email the researcher for a copy. I saw a comment from a researcher saying they actually get zero of the $30 but they have the right to give individual copies and they're always happy to see someone's interested in their work.

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 7, 2018 13:04 UTC (Fri) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link]

PhD student here. Computer science journals and conferences are quite good in this regard compared to some other sciences (medicine comes to mind). All the big publishers give you the right to publish a copy of the paper on your personal website and distribute it in benign ways. If you're looking for a paper, it's generally sufficient to find one of the authors' webpages (or the webpage of their research group), most people host all their papers online (also slides, theses, etc). And yes, people who are in charge of their own web hosting often enjoy watching the analytics fluctuate :)

The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software (Working Knowledge)

Posted Sep 14, 2018 12:59 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

As long as we allow journals to "give us the right", or not, nothing will improve. There is never a need to hand over copyright to a journal. Give them the right to publish, and retain copyright yourself. Then no one can tell you not to distribute your work any way you like.

Some journals get huffy about not getting a copyright assignment, but it is all bluff. Include a license allowing them to publish in the original submission, and then just don't return the assignment form.