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I've always thought it would be an exciting development if enough OSS developers could be paid to do their work, à la Canonical or some of the other places that
by shutter 18y ago
I've always thought it would be an exciting development if enough OSS developers could be paid to do their work, à la Canonical or some of the other places that do that.
The trouble with OSS is that most developers are working on it part-time... if more projects had dedicated teams of individuals, I think we'd see faster iterations of better quality. For instance, desktop linux is moving there pretty quick nowadays, but it still takes a lot of time and energy and coordination to form a product as cohesive as some proprietary software (e.g. Apple).
- petercooper 18y agoIn the Ruby community, quite a few of us donated to someone who wanted to work on an open source project for several months. He didn't raise quite as much money as anticipated but enough to spend a few months on a much needed library: http://rubymendicant.wikidot.com/proposal http://rubymendicant.wikidot.com/proposal
- SwellJoe 18y agoThis has been common in the Perl world for several years (I'm not saying that as a snarky "Perl did it first" kind of thing, just saying, "yes, this can work for some classes of problem, and here's more evidence"). A huge swath of Perl 6 is being paid for by small (a few hundred to a few thousand dollar) grants from The Perl Foundation, which is supported largely by individual donors.