Lazycoder

What are the costs of Open Source development?

There has been a lot of discussion centered around Open Source projects on the Microsoft platform. Some of the discussion has been about the lack of support, or interest, in OSS from Microsoft itself. Sure, you’ll see some Microsoft employees contribute to OSS, or even writing OSS. And there is CodePlex, which is Microsofts OSS portal to the world. But, in general, there is no official Microsoft support for OSS projects on it’s platform. This is in stark contrast compared to the support that Sun has shown for JBoss, Hibernate, Spring, and other OSS projects on the Java platform. Apple has built it’s OS X platform almost entirely around OSS projects.

But what kind of support should Microsoft provide? Microsoft doesn’t really consume any OSS in any of it’s products so there’s no impetus to contribute back into any source code tree. Give money to OSS developers? Well, that’s nice. But what are the costs associated with open source development?

Microsoft has (finally) provided free, slimmed down, versions of it’s primary development tool. But most of the developers producing OSS already own Visual Studio in some form or another.

Hosting costs? Codeplex, Google Code, and SourceForge all offer project hosting for OSS projects which includes web site hosting (Linux based of course. Maybe Microsoft OSS developers will want to use a Windows-based host for their site). So bandwidth costs are taken care of.

Subsidized developers? While it’s nice that developers want to get paid for working on code they love. If they are looking for a way to provide for themselves and their family, perhaps they shouldn’t quit their day job? Money for divorce lawyers after they spend all their free time coding instead of with their family? Well… not much we can do about that.

So what exactly are the big costs associated with Open Source Development? I’d like to hear from all side, Windows and other open source developers.