Wes McKinney (Pandas lead) calls out large techcos for OSS mooching

The original tweet doesn't use the word "mooching"—and I think that's a good thing. The tweet says:

> It's frustrating that the major cloud platforms ($MSFT, $AMZN, $GOOG) are now all supporting Avro, ORC, Parquet for data storage, but haven't lifted a finger to help build or maintain OSS libraries for use in Python to read and write them

I agree—that does sound frustrating. When we build FOSS software, we naturally hope that it will resonate with many users, and that at least some of our users will contribute to that software and make it better. When that doesn't happen, it's deeply frustrating.

What it isn't is mooching. Free software is, well, free software. It's not "free on the condition that you contribute" or "free unless you have a $1+ trillion market cap. It's free software, which means anyone and everyone can use it without any obligation to pay, either with money or with time.

(I realize that the original tweet doesn't contradict this, but think this point is important enough to be worth emphasizing, especially when words like "mooching" enter the conversation.)

Really, what do you expect?

What do you expect when so much of the popular message is for people to get involved in programming, and to do so while giving away the fruits of their labor--to join open source projects and the like?

I see many young people being recruited into the software engineering industry, as it's a cool new thing, and the current salaries at many corporations are still attractive to many people. Of course, much of the message to get involved in the industry is to--spoiler alert--increase the pool of talent and reduce the cost of software development (salaries). But even beyond that, bodies are essentially being indoctrinated into a system where working for free is heavily promoted. They may be paid in good vibes and perhaps some attention, but that's a small price for many entities to pay.

It should be obvious: if you create something and release it into the wild, for all to see--the good actors and the bad actors--, what you create can be used in any way, by any one. You've given it to them, and for free; they owe you nothing. At the very least, people should understand some of the basic legal mechanisms that can offer them some protection (e.g. copyright) and ensure their creative expressions are used in some accordance with their wishes (at least, by those who follow the law).

Do good work. Get a fair price for it.

I wouldn't call it mooching at all. I persuaded Amazon to open source an entire deep learning framework (DSSTNE). it would have been super nice if someone had built a python interface to it. I'm not complaining but when I'm told the tech companies aren't open sourcing interesting technology I tune out.

PS we're building that python interface now ourselves...

Referencing the companies in the original tweet, each one has a landing page (internal or on Github) for how they contribute to OSS. Making open standards which are cross-compatible between programs doesn't happen overnight, where often community-driven users are a force under which further awareness and adoption are spread.

[0] https://opensource.microsoft.com/

[1] https://aws.github.io/ and https://aws.amazon.com/mp/oss/

[2] https://opensource.google.com/

Step 1: Convince people that using non-Free-as-in-Freedom and non-OSS software is immoral.

Step 2: Criticize people and organizations that follow the license but otherwise ‘incorrectly’ use Free-as-in-Freedom and OSS software.