Earlier this week Infoworld published an article entitled “the fight over open source leeches”, which I described as “a good summary from InfoWorld of the issues related to (lack of) corporate contributions.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean that I agree with the underlying theme of the article: that non-contributing open source users are damaging the commercial interests of open source vendors.

A number of commentaters have already debunked that view. In the article itself, Navica CEO Bernard Golden states: “If a license says anyone can use it, that’s what they have to live with.”

Jeremy Garcia of linuxquestions adds: “I see a couple issues with this mindset. First, a project initially has the right to pick any license they like. Later complaining that people who are following that license aren’t giving back seems a little disingenuous. If you want mandatory contributions, pick a license that requires that (keep in mind that as a result it will almost certainly not be Open Source software).”

Jeremy also makes a good point that is not as clear in the original article as it could be: that there is a difference between vendors that make use of open source code without abiding with the terms of the license and users that legitimately make use of open source code without paying for support or contributing modifications.

Examples of the first group are being dealt with one at a time by the SFLC. With reference to the second group it is important to note that contributing doesn’t just mean money or code.

ScaleDB Mike Hogan lists a number of ways in which non-paying users add value without contributing code:

• Customers validate a product
• Customers become unpaid sales people
• Customers become unpaid support people
• Customers fuel the ecosystem
• Customers define standards
• Customers fund open source development
• Customers fund open source companies

(Arguably the reference to ‘customers’ confuses the issue since non-paying users are by definition not customers, which negates the last two points, although given that Mike’s larger point is about code contributions I have included the full list).

If we accept that non-paying users cannot be obligated to contribute to a project as long as they abide by the terms of the license, there is also the question as to whether they should be “encouraged” to do so.

Bob Sutor notes that any plan to guilt-trip users into becoming contributors is likely to backfire. “Guilt can be a damaging thing and is not going to make more people contribute. Contribute because you believe it is the right thing to do and you have something of significant value to give back.”

But what about the view, expressed by Michael Sharf in his blog post and the Infoworld article that the lack of contributions back to the community is equivalent to the “tragedy of the commons”.

That theory relies on the shared resource being limited and damaged by individual actions. Users not contributing to an open source project may not be adding to a shared resource, but they are also not taking anything away. As Jeremy notes:

“It should also be noted that a specific individual or group using but not contributing to a particular project does not really ‘destroy a shared resource’. Since that additional usage doesn’t deplete a finite resource, I’m not sure the tragedy of the commons really comes into play here.”

The point that non-contributing users neither add to nor deplete open source software is an important one that has also recently been made by Linus Torvalds, as quoted by Matt Asay.

“The fact is, a freeloader is a freeloader. They are neither evil nor good per se and neither add value nor take it away,” he wrote, before making it clear why open source vendors should be careful not to dismiss such users as ‘leeches’: “but they very much are a potential tester and contributor. So they all have the potential for becoming something more.”