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Shykes, I understand how I sounded, but I meant absolutely no offence to your achievement as a team. You absolutely deserve the money and even in my little worl

by galenko 13y ago

Shykes, I understand how I sounded, but I meant absolutely no offence to your achievement as a team. You absolutely deserve the money and even in my little world you're not "just another startup" as I'm a huge fan of docker and believe it's the future. "Casually" is more of an observation of HN, as not a day goes by without someone getting millions in funding, but I'm aware of how not casual the whole approach to getting that much bank is and how much work is actually involved. docker does in fact live in the real world and play by its rules, it's not a bad thing, objectively, only an idiot wouldn't. If you play your cards right, you'll make money, won't ever need to beg for donations and will do just fine becoming the new standard. OpenBSD tries to live in an idea, which is close to my heart and I imagine close to anyone, who grew up toying with kernels and working on distros. The recent donation thing was like a reminder that Santa's not real and there is no magical fairy land, where just putting your head down and doing what you believe is the right thing for the benefit of everyone, without thinking about money, will be rewarded.

shykes 13y ago
No offense taken whatsoever. I agree it's an important and unsolved topic, and I myself still have a few old OpenBSD posters from my teenage years :) Having grown up in a family of "starving artists" like they say, I see a lot of parallels between open-source development and, say, music, painting, dancing etc. There are many people who produce art as a "gift" to society, without financial motives. This almost always comes with a tension between the quality and intensity of your work and how you will earn a living. Perhaps you have the luxury of not requiring payment for your work, because you have another source of income - but then you might be limited in the time and energy you can invest in your art. Or conversely, you wish to focus your entire time and energy on your work, but find out that securing funding from your artistic work (whether royalties, donations, salary or grants) quickly becomes a job of its own - it is common for artists to feel that the grind of securing money for their work has become their primary job. Some discover they have a knack for it, or just get lucky, and find immense commercial success. There is a commonly held notion that commercial success is inversely proportional to intrinsic artistic value. But of course it's hard to know for sure since that is such a subjective thing to measure. Is Justin Bieber's art "less good" than the local rock band I watched last night? It depends who you ask :) So why is it difficult for artists, sometimes immensely talented and critically appreciated artists, to secure funding? Obviously a complex and immense question. In some societies the notion of paying someone for art is inexistant, because everyone produces art on a daily basis as part of their culture. In our society, it is accepted to pay for art as a service, but only to a point, and following rules that can be hard to decipher because they rely on guessing other people's emotions, like fashion or the capital markets. At the end of the day, I think part of the problem is that art, like writing open-source code, is an enjoyable activity. People like to do it. Many people turn out to be good at it. Some people even pay for the privilege of doing it. Which means it will always be a buyer's market.

by galenko 13y ago

shykes 13y ago

No offense taken whatsoever. I agree it's an important and unsolved topic, and I myself still have a few old OpenBSD posters from my teenage years :) Having grown up in a family of "starving artists" like they say, I see a lot of parallels between open-source development and, say, music, painting, dancing etc. There are many people who produce art as a "gift" to society, without financial motives. This almost always comes with a tension between the quality and intensity of your work and how you will earn a living. Perhaps you have the luxury of not requiring payment for your work, because you have another source of income - but then you might be limited in the time and energy you can invest in your art. Or conversely, you wish to focus your entire time and energy on your work, but find out that securing funding from your artistic work (whether royalties, donations, salary or grants) quickly becomes a job of its own - it is common for artists to feel that the grind of securing money for their work has become their primary job. Some discover they have a knack for it, or just get lucky, and find immense commercial success. There is a commonly held notion that commercial success is inversely proportional to intrinsic artistic value. But of course it's hard to know for sure since that is such a subjective thing to measure. Is Justin Bieber's art "less good" than the local rock band I watched last night? It depends who you ask :) So why is it difficult for artists, sometimes immensely talented and critically appreciated artists, to secure funding? Obviously a complex and immense question. In some societies the notion of paying someone for art is inexistant, because everyone produces art on a daily basis as part of their culture. In our society, it is accepted to pay for art as a service, but only to a point, and following rules that can be hard to decipher because they rely on guessing other people's emotions, like fashion or the capital markets. At the end of the day, I think part of the problem is that art, like writing open-source code, is an enjoyable activity. People like to do it. Many people turn out to be good at it. Some people even pay for the privilege of doing it. Which means it will always be a buyer's market.