# There are a lot of open-source projects

SourceForge has 325,939 projects registered.  Google Code has over 250,000.
GitHub has (depending on what you count as a project) between 885,000 and 2.9
million.

The questions we are asking have been asked many times before.

# How do they get maintained?

Open-source projects generally get work done on them by two types of people:

* People paid to work on them
* People with a personal interest in them

It surprises many programmers to learn that people actually paid to work on
open-source software, but it makes sense from a business perspective - if you
base your entire business on, say, the Apache HTTP server, paying one of your
developers to put in a few hours a week improving it is still less expensive
than licensing a proprietary product, plus you get the features you want
implemented and the bugs you need fixed.

# Mozilla

![](01-maintenance/mozilla.png)

Mozilla Firefox is a popular browser, being the first to lead any significant
userbase away from Microsoft's Internet Explorer.  Guess what?  The Mozilla
Corporation has an annual revenue of over $90 million and has over 600
employees.

And who provides the funding for all these programmers (and marketing drones,
and managers, etc.)?  For having the default search engine set as Google, that
estimable company provides rougly 85% of Mozilla's revenue.

# OpenOffice.org

![](01-maintenance/OOo.png)

Sun released OpenOffice.org as a free version of StarOffice, with the intent of
luring away users from Microsoft Office with the lower price, then convincing
them to switch to StarOffice for more features.  At its peak, Sun had over
38,000 employees.

# The GIMP

![](01-maintenance/gimp.png)

The GIMP is worked on just by volunteers; it has a shitty UI and took years to
get simple scalable brushes.

# Apache

![](01-maintenance/apache.png)

The Apache Foundation provides infrastructure and support for a project,
particularly legal protection.  Work is done by volunteers and funding is
through donations.

# GNU

![](01-maintenance/gnu.png)

GNU similarly provides infrastructure and legal protection for projects.  Both
GNU and Apache do not, however, provide any programming work - it's up to the
projects to find their own developers.

# GitHub

![](01-maintenance/github.png)

GitHub has made it easy for members of a community to submit patches to a
product; it should be noted that the community needs to *exist*, though.
GitHub helps you get volunteer contributions, but it isn't magic.

# Maintenance vs. Development #

Feature development is a lot of work.  If we, as we intend, produce at the end
of the year a mostly-bug-free product, then maintenance *should* be minimal -
tweaks as clients install new versions of Java or their browsers.

Maintenance can be done by an already-employeed developer, for a few hours
every now and then.

Feature requests could be aggregated and assigned periodically in batch to a
group of students in a class.

Alternatively, some group of consultants (possibly a subset of the students
currently involved with development) could charge for support and development.

# What's this all mean for us? #

# No one cares that much about Scheduler. #

We're not going to work on Scheduler in our spare time, just for kicks.

# Someone will have to pay for maintenance. #

As stated above, that cost could be credit for students, hours for a salaried
employee, or wage for a consultant.