What does ‘Nightly Builds’ mean

Bounties & Rewards

Many open source projects offer bounties for fixing certain bugs:

• Chromium's Vulnerability Reward Program (sponsored by Google, and expanded several times)
• Ubuntu (sponsored by Canonical) ^{(appears to be closed now)}

Others are sponsored by individual donations or 3rd-parties:

• The FOSS Factory

Open-Source Commercial and Non-Commercial Software Positions

Some open-source projects (open-source does not imply free software) are sponsored and managed and they have full-time employees working on these. These could include:

• RedHat (Linux, some Java-related development like GCJ contributions, past contributions from their members to known open-source projects for internal work, etc...)
• Sun/Oracle (OpenJDK, MySQL, and many related community projects)
• Google (many of their open-source libraries have full-time teams, Chromium, Android...)

While this may not why you originally had in mind, they are indeed open-source projects, and they do have people being paid to work on them.

Some people and most companies have a strange perception about the value of code.

"We spent $100,000 on this project therefore the code must be worth that" and feel a need to protect it.

In reality most code is more like paint. You spend $100 on paint and $200 dollars to apply it to your walls. But now the paint is worth nothing, you cannot sell it, nobody wants it, and even if they did you cannot take it of your wall and put it on somebody else's wall.

It may enhance the value of the building but you cannot realize this without selling the building.

You could "steal" Amazons code base (most of it is freely available from various open source projects) and set up an Ammassons web site but you would not take over much of Amazons business.

Code is a necessary part of any modern businesses infrastructure, but, it only has value as part of a process and culture, on its own its worth nothing.

I would add there are some situations where the code is vital to the business and would be valuable enough to any competitor that it should be kept secret:

• To prevent malicious manipulation of your facilities -- a good example would be Google's "page rank" system which is constantly being "gamed" to give web sites an unjustifiably high rank.
• Automated Trading Algorithms -- an unscrupulous competitor could study the algorithm and fool your system into selling too low and buying too high.
• A "faster/better" algorithim -- if your software' s unique selling point is a faster better algorithm for sorting/compressing/whatever then it probably pays to keep this a trade secret for as long as possible.