[Fsf-friends] How Free Software Pays my Bills (Steven M Rubin)

[Rakesh 'Arky' Ambati]

Hello There,

Often Free Software developers are projected in bad light,perhaps this
autobiographical article will enlighten quite a few.

http://www.free-soft.org/FSM/english/issue03/paybills.html

How Free Software Pays my Bills
by Steven M. Rubin
Static Free Software

I've been playing with computers since I was in High School 35 years
ago. And 
in those 35 years, I've done it all: a Computer Science Ph.D. and a host
of 
jobs including systems administrator, researcher, professor, author, 
entrepreneur, and most of all, programmer. What I like most about
computers 
is that I can build useful programs for other people. The idea of free 
software has always made sense to me.

And now free software is my business. A program that I wrote nearly 20
years 
ago ("Electric") is a GNU offering, and I work on it full-time. For the
past 
3 years, I've earned more than ever before by consulting, training, and 
selling products related to this system. I'm so busy that the "dot
bomb" 
didn't even touch me. And everyone who I consult for (Sun, Intel, etc.) 
agrees that I may take the improvements - that they pay for - and give
it out 
to the GNU community.

How did this come about? Here is my story.

Electric, 1982

It all started back in 1982 when I was working at the Fairchild
Artificial 
Intelligence Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. It made sense, when
working 
for a chip manufacturer, to investigate ideas in Computer-Aided Design
(CAD). 
And this was at the time when the famous textbook by Mead and Conway
came out 
("Introduction to VLSI Systems"). With this book, integrated-circuit
design 
became less of a black art and more accessible to the masses. After
using two 
other CAD systems, I decided to write my own, and so I built Electric.
Even 
by today's standards, this system has clever ideas that make it
powerful. 
Soon, everyone in the lab was using it to design chips.

Now Fairchild, at that time, was owned by Schlumberger, a large company
that 
had many other holdings. One of those other holdings was Applicon, a
maker of 
CAD systems. When we showed Electric to people at Applicon, they
declared 
that they already knew all of these ideas, and so they had no interest
in it.

This news made me very happy, because I could then suggest to the lab 
director that we give this worthless CAD system away to others. The lab 
started giving out the Electric source code to universities and other 
nonprofit groups (licensed in the style of Bell Labs' UNIX). After a
few 
years, it was widely used. For example, Canada and New Zealand set up 
agencies in their countries to support Electric for the schools of
their 
nation.

Leaving the Womb

But then I quit working for Schlumberger, and since they owned my
system, I 
also quit working on Electric. Or so I thought. One day a man named
Brian 
Gardiner called me on the phone and told me an incredible thing: he had
just 
bought the rights to Electric from Schlumberger. He was forming a
company 
called Electric Editor Inc., and he needed my help.

For 10 years, Electric Editor lived on the edge of survival. Brian took
no 
salary for many of those years. At first, the system was priced low (it
was 
already developed and ready to use). But people were afraid to purchase
it 
because of its suspiciously low price. So Brian raised the price to be 
competitive. Then the customers had another reason to avoid us: we were
too 
small. Complex CAD systems require extensive training, and people were
afraid 
of having to retrain if our small company folded.

It was a double-edged sword. The only place where Electric did well 
commercially was as a "custom-solutions" CAD system. A few large
software 
development projects were undertaken for customers whose needs were
outside 
of the mainstream. Electric was easy to customize to these special
needs.

But it wasn't enough, and Electric Editor decided to close its doors. It
was 
at this point that I was able to convince them to place Electric at GNU.
Was 
it a last act of desperation for a dying company? No, it was a crafty
way to 
solve all of Electric's problems at once!

Free at Last

The two objections to the use of Electric were price and company
stability. 
As a piece of "free software" from the most well-known free software 
collection, both of these issues are finally put to rest. The low price
is no 
longer suspicious, because everyone knows and understands the "free
software 
model". And people also feel that GNU is at least as stable as any
company in 
business today.

I purchased the rights to Electric from the old company and formed a new
one: 
Static Free Software (www.staticfreesoft.com). My new company finally
had the 
perfect product: a CAD system you can trust, at a price you can afford.

But what's in it for me? First off, it's still great to see people using
my 
programs, and now I have users all over the world. University
professors 
teach classes with Electric, many individual "hobbyists" are designing
chips 
at home, and engineers at large companies are evaluating and using it.
I'm 
doing a modest business just selling supported binaries, documentation
and 
CDs on the web.

But the real payoff comes when a large company wants Electric, and pays
me to 
help them. For the past 3 years, I have consulted continuously at Sun 
Microsystems. During that time, I have also done projects for Intel and
a 
number of smaller companies. Free software consulting has turned into a 
modern "cottage industry", where I sit home in my "cottage" uploading 
software to the web, and customers on the other side of the world wire 
payment to my bank account.

Staying Free

Everyone knows the classic work-world model: when you work for "the
man," he 
owns your soul. And when a company pays me to develop Electric, they
own 
those improvements. But thanks to GNU, this scenario gets changed.
Because 
improving Electric could trigger the GPL and force distribution, most 
companies see this as an encumbrance that has potential "downstream
cost." So 
corporate lawyers regularly assign ownership of the improvements to me.
That 
way, they don't have to worry about fulfilling the terms of the GPL.

Corporate lawyers hate the GPL for another reason as well: its "viral" 
nature. If even a single subroutine of Electric's code is used in any
other 
company product, that entire product gets "infected" and must be given
away 
free (this is not my analogy: I've heard it from corporate lawyers more
than 
once). One company, to protect itself, purchased a "commercial license"
from 
me that circumvented the GPL and granted them more control of
distribution. 
But I was still able to stipulate in this commercial license that the
bulk of 
the improvements, and all of the bug fixes, would be owned by me and
thus 
remain free. In the 17 months since that agreement was made, none of my
work 
has been restricted in any way, and all of it gets sent to GNU.

So every day, I work on Electric, and I still love it. I don't work
very 
hard: about 25 billable hours per week, plus time in the evening to
answer 
"fan mail". No boss can kill my project, and there's never been a lack
of 
work. I even have colleagues all over the world who contribute code and
help 
me to build a well-respected piece of software. It could never have
happened 
without GNU.
About the Author

Steven M. Rubin is the author of the Electric VLSI Design System, and
the CAD 
tools textbook "Computer Aids for VLSI Design." He received his
doctorate at 
Carnegie Mellon University and has done research at Bell Labs,
Schlumberger, 
and Apple. Specializing in visually-oriented computing, his research
has 
spanned computer vision, graphics, and CAD. Steve is also the lead
singer of 
Severe Tire Damage, the first band to perform live on the Internet.
Knowlege is power... share it equitably!



-- 
arky

Rakesh 'arky' Ambati
GPG Key ID:  0x92BCF7D4 
Blog [ http://arky.in ]
Member FSUG-Bangalore [ http://bangalore.gnu.org.in ]
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
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