3
Votes
Not FUD. Instead, it’s a beautiful one page summary from 2003 that still holds true today.
Without incentives, nobody wants to work on the boring parts of software development. Normal projects use money as an incentive, but the F in FOSS prevents this from ever happening. Instead, when the bug list gets too long, FOSS projects simply start from scratch because this is more fun than fixing bugs.
When your only payment is pats on the back, is anyone going to fix a bug that won’t even get them that?
Comments
Jamie Zawinski is brilliant. Too bad he retired from software development to open a bar. We could use someone like him today, not for the programming, but for honest opinions like these. The likes of Stallman are too blinded by “freedom” to notice these issues.
Many boring parts of FOSS today are done by employees of Redhat, IBM, Novell, Google, Apple (yes, Apple contributes to FOSS, surprise), and other companies that pay money. Unfortunately, they have different priorities than end user. And what’s worse, their own employees sometimes do the rewrites (I’m looking at you, Lennart Poettering).
Some people get it, which is why things like RewardJS exist:
http://rewardjs.com/
“Some people get it, which is why things like RewardJS exist”
At least these rewards are better than those on the cherokee project. As for now, no bounties are published on their site, but some ran for years without being tackled.
Note those were for sponsor requested features, not bugfixes, yet rewards were pretty low, not a single one was over $500
You must be signed in to leave comments.