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

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Sun, 16 Apr 2006 15:03:05 +0200, Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> 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,

Public involvement is the driving force behind the pop-culture.

> and open source does
> not imply absence of project rules. 
> Open source software does not by itself define how a project
> is run, obviously.

Exactly

>> They could become managers,
>> advocates instead.
> 
> Could you elaborate a bit how they could do this, and why they
> would want to do this?

Why shouldn't they? People adapt quickly. Their goals are formed by the
society. There always will be a pair of idiots working on compilers in
their spare time, but you cannot rely on exceptions.

>> 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?

Not wages, but differentiation of according to individual contribution.

> Conversely, can you provide evidence that lower wages warrant lower
> quality of software?

There are strong historical evidences that lack of differentiation leads to
lower quality. Former SU suffered this problem. Economics based slavery
did.

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de