Re: Making money on open source, if not by selling _support_, then how?

[Georg Bauhaus <bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On Sun, 2006-04-16 at 12:53 +0200, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:
>  this is easily verifiable by observing growth
> > rate of publically available open source software.
> 
> ... which bears all signs of pop-culture, by the way. Public involvement
> destroys quality and even common sense. Turn MTV on, if you want an
> example. Openness /= direct democracy.

pop-culture /= Public involvement, and open source does
not imply absence of project rules. 
Open source software does not by itself define how a project
is run, obviously.

Observing open source projects might be a little easier than
observing closed source projects, but you don't necessarily
see programmers at work from outside, right?
 So who are we to judge every project based on its openness
of sources?


> Now, my these is: hiring only qualified applicants must be the rule for
> *all* types of job, if we consider a quality-oriented production. When I
> say that neither of existing systems works, I mean that this selection does
> not happen. Firstly, there is no efficient mechanism of selection.
> Secondly, there is no motivation for people to become selected. Qualified
> programmers don't grow on trees. If the reward is to work 42 hours washing
> dishes and 30 contributing at night to a GNU project, then I don't see why
> students should spend 10+ years studying CS. 

An interesting assessment. I think the best source of information
is to consider the programmers in place of trees, or dishes.
There are ways to find out why they do what they do. One reported reason
is dull work that isn't fun, but you get payed.


> They could become managers,
> advocates instead.

Could you elaborate a bit how they could do this, and why they
would want to do this?

> The attitude "it is no matter how much we pay them, because they would do
> the work anyway" is deeply rooted in both systems. This is why quality
> suffers.

OK, some people want to maintain the impression that their high
pay is justified. I'm not blaming them. But on which facts could we
build a hypothesis that high wages guarantee high quality?
Conversely, can you provide evidence that lower wages warrant lower
quality of software?