Open source as a concept often suffers from a strong desire to wish away something innate in (almost?) every human: greed. It's great that so many people are willing to work hard to develop free software, but ultimately most people want to know how it will serve them rather than how they can contribute to the "greater good". Yes, it's true that great free software serves us all well, but we're so used to paying (and being paid) for the things we value that for many people, allocating resources to develop open source solutions doesn't seem like a viable option. Education might help change minds, but maybe there's another way...
Unless you start policing the process, there's no effective method for punishing those who take without giving... nor, in my opinion, should that be the goal. Forget those who won't play by or actively subvert the rules. They will always exist and should be considered irrelevant to the goals of open source.
Maybe I'm delusional, but it seems that there might be a solution in finding a way (other than handing out trophies and giving congratulatory speeches) to reward people who participate and contribute actively. People who work hard could receive some form of remuneration, effectively encouraging those who might not otherwise contribute to give something back.
How would this be implemented? Each project team would have to consider and implement compensation if and how it is appropriate to attain the goals of that specific collective effort. In other words, I have no absolute answer to that question, but it seems worthy of at least some consideration.
Lord knows I'm ignorant of the efforts to this end within the open source community. Maybe this has already been tried and miserably failed. If so, maybe it's just a matter of implementation? Just a thought...
Re: Human Nature Avoidable?
Posted by
Kurt Seifried
at
2007-04-20 05:56
What you just described sounds a lot like a corporation. You know, teams of people, renumeration, users voting on what they want (with their dollars), etc. Oh wait we have those in the Open Source world (Red Hat, Novell, IBM, etc.). I personally know dozens of people who wrote free code, earned their chops and then got well paying jobs writing more free code (High speed serial device drivers for the Linux kernel, Web based frameworks/applications, etc.).
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Unless you start policing the process, there's no effective method for punishing those who take without giving... nor, in my opinion, should that be the goal. Forget those who won't play by or actively subvert the rules. They will always exist and should be considered irrelevant to the goals of open source.
Maybe I'm delusional, but it seems that there might be a solution in finding a way (other than handing out trophies and giving congratulatory speeches) to reward people who participate and contribute actively. People who work hard could receive some form of remuneration, effectively encouraging those who might not otherwise contribute to give something back.
How would this be implemented? Each project team would have to consider and implement compensation if and how it is appropriate to attain the goals of that specific collective effort. In other words, I have no absolute answer to that question, but it seems worthy of at least some consideration.
Lord knows I'm ignorant of the efforts to this end within the open source community. Maybe this has already been tried and miserably failed. If so, maybe it's just a matter of implementation? Just a thought...