Off the Beat: Bruce Byfield's Blog

Free riders, people who contribute nothing to the software they use, are to free and open source software (FOSS) what illegal downloaders are to the Recording Industry Association of America. They're people who are perceived as getting away with something, and are the subject of periodic rants. Really, though, I don't see what the fuss is about.

Yes, FOSS projects might be better off if everyone who used their software contributed code, time, or cash. Projects could be finished faster, and core team members might be able to work full time on what is now an avocation. But the complaints would seem more valid if more projects made more effort to welcome newcomers and orient them. When the difficulties of being accepted into most projects are so notorious, it's hard to sympathize with denunciations of free riders. If you scare people away, don't expect much sympathy when you complain about the lack of contributors.

More importantly, nothing in any free license obliges users to contribute to a project. Free licenses are about how you share or copy the software, and include no language whatsoever about what you should give back. You might think that someone who distributes software under another name or takes advantage of a BSD-style license to make code proprietary is a sleazy con artist (I tend to think that way myself). Yet what they are doing is legal, and, if you know anything whatsoever about human nature, you can't convincingly pretend that you're surprised.

Besides, whatever happened to the idea that FOSS development is about someone scratching their own itch? Coders gain work experience, net cred, personal satisfaction, the respect of peers, and often a salary from FOSS projects. Expecting help, gratitude, and/or cash on top of all these benefits is unrealistic. The fact is, FOSS is set up largely for those who are intrinsically motivated -- people who do things for their own personal reasons. Extrinsic rewards are simply not a large part of the FOSS social contract, although everyone is glad when enough extrinsic rewards exist that they can work on FOSS full-time.

Anyway, you can rant all you like about freeloaders, but you're mostly wasting your time. Nobody has found a way to stop free riders or entice them into contributing, any more than any movie or record executive has found a way to stop file sharing. And if movie and record executives with all their financial clout and access to law makers can't do anything to slow file sharing, you can be sure that relatively penniless FOSS projects are even more powerless against free riders.

No matter what anyone does, free riders will continue to exist -- and, regardless of what you think about them, there's not a damn thing you can do about them.

The Gaiman Perspective

Instead of wasting time with useless complaints, you might want to cultivate a different attitude to free riders. I'd suggest the same perspective that fantasist Neil Gaiman offers in a video about people sharing copies of his books on line.

At first, Gaiman says, he held the conventional view that a book share for free on line was a theft from him. But then he noticed that, "in places where I was being pirated ... I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me from being pirated , and, when a new book wold come out . . . they would sell more and more copies." Experimenting with briefly offering a free download of his novel American Gods for a month, he found that, during that month, sales increased by 300%.

Polling audiences at his talks, he soon discovered why: roughly ninety percent of people discovered their favorite authors by being lent a book. Gaiman concluded that when you offer a free download, "what you're actually doing is advertising -- you're reaching more people."

Gaiman's discovery suggests to me the way that projects might look at free riders. Instead of seeing free riders as users who take and give nothing in return, perhaps projects should look at them as free advertisers. Every copy of an application that is being used is potentially a portal for other people to discover FOSS -- and some of those others may become genuine contributors.

That may be true even of free riders who are re-branding the software. If those who repackage OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice are any example, they often point to the mailing lists for support. At other times, people who have had a bad experience with a repackager stumble across the community on their own. They may come to complain, but a few stay and become contributors.

Most, of course, never contribute. But considering that few projects are organized to accept a mass influx of new members, probably that is just as well. The point is that so-called free riders may actually be contributing to FOSS indirectly.

Rethinking the Obvious

Many people in FOSS support file-sharing in some form or other. Yet, where free loaders are concerned, they often fall back on conventional economic models that they have rejected for development and distribution.

In some ways, this reliance on old models is understandable. The conventional models are full of colorful metaphors -- for instance, "free riders," "the tragedy of the commons," and "there ain't so such thing as a free lunch." By contrast, alternative models are not nearly as memorable.

Yet, having already rejected conventional models in other areas, maybe the community needs to explore the possibility that free riders need to be re-examined as well. Most free riders may be acting for selfish needs, but, just possibly, they help the software they use far more they or anyone else imagines.

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