Beneficial Proprietary Extensions of Open Source Software?

One of the arguments for choosing Apache/BSD/MIT software licenses over Free Software licenses like the GPL is that the former harness the profit motive of individuals and companies for the benefit of the open source users. There is hypothetical positive feedback: Apache/BSD/MIT licenses allow proprietary extensions, which in turn lift up the open source source software by giving back bug fixes and feature enhancements.

Does this actually happen? Is the give-back significant, or does value mostly work its way up from open source community contributions? How many fixes and features come from work on proprietary, pay sites? How many come from proprietary, commercial software products?

I've made proprietary MapServer-based sites -- sites available to paying users, but no downloadable code or configuration -- and when they required enhancements or fixes of MapServer, I made the improvements and then gave them back (with consent of my customers) to the MapServer community. However, most of my MapServer contributions were made through my work on community, for-the-public software. The same goes for MapServer in general: most recent work on MapServer was (i'm digging up the stats on lines of code) done to implement OGC standards (WMS, WFS, WCS, SLD) for public-facing Canadian government web sites.

Do any of my readers have examples -- I'm specifically curious about any involving MapServer and GDAL/OGR -- of proprietary sites or software that have extended and improved open source GIS software?

Comments

Re: Beneficial Proprietary Extensions of Open Source Software?

Author: hobu

http://www.gdal.org/credits.html provides a significant list of direct contribution in the form of in-kind development, contract funding, and general sponsorship. http://www.gdal.org/index.html has a good list at the bottom of examples where GDAL/OGR has been extended in both proprietary and free ways.

Re: Beneficial Proprietary Extensions of Open Source Software?

Author: Sean

Thanks, hobu. GDAL's history supports the hypothesis. Is there any more?

Re: Beneficial Proprietary Extensions of Open Source Software?

Author: Paul Ramsey

The last couple of revisions of GEOS have been partly funded by Safe Software and Autodesk, who both use it in their proprietary products. http://svn.refractions.net/geos/trunk/AUTHORS

Re: Beneficial Proprietary Extensions of Open Source Software?

Author: Chris 'Xenon' Hanson

3D Nature's software utilizes IJG's libjpeg, libpng, zlib, libtiff, libgeotiff, fips123, the USGS's GCTPC2 projection library and the OpenSceneGraph toolkit (which itself uses msot of the above and even more, like FreeType, ungif, shapelib, etc). Whenever we find a bug that we can solve, we contribute fixes back to the project. I think commercial use of open source libraries definitely has a beneficial effect on their quality. Commercial users often have a more compelling "itch" to "scratch" and are may be more motivated to get things fixed than someone who isn't working under the gun of a client or manager.

Re: Beneficial Proprietary Extensions of Open Source Software?

Author: Sean

Chris, I'm looking for examples that are more specific, like the ones from GDAL and GEOS.

Re: Beneficial Proprietary Extensions of Open Source Software?

Author: FrankW

As mentioned earlier, at least half of the improvements to GDAL were supported by proprietary software vendors. For MapServer the one item I did that comes to mind was OUTPUTFORMAT capacity which was done for i-cubed, a for-pay services company. Also, a few improvements (eg. raster resampling kernels) were for Tydac AG in switzerland who sells a proprietary product layered on MapServer. I will conceed when I dig through many of my other improvements to MapServer, they were related to contracts that were ultimately government or research oriented. I suppose the work done by Jani from SRC would definately qualify as a proprietary software company folding improvements back into open source. Another non-mapserver, non-gdal example is that the addition of BigTIFF support to libtiff (a substantial project) is being funded by four proprietary software vendors. I think the impact of propietary software vendors is in large part related to the nature of the product. If it is a component that is useful to proprietary software vendors, and the license is not a barrier, it is not uncommon to get their support.

Re: Beneficial Proprietary Extensions of Open Source Software?

Author: Robert Osfield

As the project lead of the OpensSceneGraph and proprietor of OpenSceneGraph Professional Services that provides services on top the project, I can first hand qualify the proprietary use of open source is major driver for success of open source projects. Without proprietary software companies using the OpenSceneGraph I would have no customers, with no customer you have no income, with no income you can't commit fully to a project. A number of small consultancies have sprung up around the OpenSceneGraph Project so making a living from open source development is perfectly viable, albeit low key. Proprietary software companies also contribute in the form of testing, bug fixing, developing new modules and contributing them back to the project. These contributions are kept open source and further benefit the project and the users. Extensions of open source that is kept proprietary, such as plugins and NodeKits will typically have little impact on the open source projects themselves. Lots of users of the OpenSceneGraph extend it for there own applications, and this is a perfectly fine way to work. There needs to be distinction made between licenses so, the LGPL allows such proprietary extensions, GPL doesn't. Robert Osfield http://www.openscenegraph.com