
Is Money Useless to Open Source Projects? - sant0sk1
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001158.html
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gm
This guy is absolutely, positively, dead wrong about OSS projects and money.

First of all, money is nothing but a resource. Get that word in your head.
Resource. It means you can use it towards a goal. You can administer it.

So this guy gave $5K to someone that does not know how to manage it. At least
the administrator is smart enough not to touch it (when in doubt, do nothing,
some people say). But he is also a bad enough administrator not to touch it.

What would I do with $5K on a OSS project? Hire developers for a beginning.
Hire a full-time guy for 3-6 months (depending on where the programmer is) and
set a very clear goal as to what is to be accomplished during this time. The
goal will vary depending on the project, but the idea is to have a person
deadly-focused on a goal.

This guy is making a generic conclusion (open source does not need money)
because of a bad project admin/lead.

The conclusion this guy makes is that time matters more than money. Duh! Of
course it does. Money, however, buys time. Therein lies the missed connection.

~~~
pchristensen
It wouldn't be the first time Atwood made a generalization based on one data
point.

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xlnt
How is it possible to "generalize" from one data point? The normal method of
generalizing is finding a similarity shared across many data points, and
proposing it applies more widely.

Perhaps one could generalize badly with 2 data points, but isn't it just
impossible with 1, and therefore he must actually be doing something else?

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pchristensen
That logical impossibility is _exactly_ what I meant when I made the comment.
If generalization doesn't work for you, how about this:

"This wouldn't be the first time that Atwood came up with a theory that only
had to fit one data point."

He could just as easily have said that all open source developers are Italian
or that Italians can't spend money, and he would have been just as wrong.

~~~
xlnt
ok i agree

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jrockway
$5000 isn't enough to quit your full-time job, so it's pretty much worthless.
There is only so much time in a day, regardless of monetary incentive. The
best way to "donate" to an open source project is to hire the developer(s) to
work on the project for a certain percentage of their time. (Google does
this.)

That said, the money is good for traveling to conferences. I can't believe
this .NET guy can't think of _a single conference_ that he wants to attend or
speak at. I've already been to 4 this year, and have at least 3 more. Three
are international, so the travel costs kind of add up. So that's what I use
donations / book revenue / etc. for.

~~~
michaelneale
There are a lot of freelancers/one man shows who contribute to open source, so
in that case, their time is a bit more liquid and the 5K would be put to good
use.

~~~
jrockway
That's true, but you can't say no to a big client just because you happen to
have some donation money floating around.

~~~
michaelneale
ok also true. I guess ideally people would find a good use for it (in the past
the money could have been put to good use on infrastructure etc, but now OSS
hosting environments are almost entirely free - as in free beer free).

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stcredzero
He's right that time is the key resource. However, money can buy time. This
has to be bought in certain established increments, however. (Full-time
employees. Interns.) $80k is going to be a lot more useful than 16 chunks of
$5000.

There are very few Open Source projects with some form of GUI that reach a
professional level of polish without money. Anyone know of the exceptions?

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rw
There's something about Atwood's writing that makes me mad he earns any income
from that site.

~~~
Hexstream
He writes so much it's no wonder he eventually has to sacrifice relevance for
lack of experience.

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jonknee
Looking at that project's website, I probably would have spent it on a
designer / copy editor.

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tomh
Sounds like the local laws were at fault, which begs the question; why accept
money in the first place if you don't have a legal entity in place to use it
properly?

Set up an LLC in the USA with that cash, or at least a non-profit that can
accept donations (and therefore, make them tax-deductable so that _more_
people will be encouraged to donate, instead of less, since um, googling the
OSS project in question will now point to Atwood's post, which wouldn't
convince _me_ to give them any money at all).

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omouse
Stop submitting CodingHorror.com blog posts here. They add nothing and aren't
even worth discussing when Atwood doesn't take the fucking time to research
things. _Flagged_.

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raganwald
Let's do this: you vote for the posts you like, I'll vote for the articles I
like, and we'll let the YC News ranking engine push the posts neither of us
like off the front page.

There's aboslutely no need to tell people not to post stuff, unless you think
that posts like Atwood's will get votes.

~~~
omouse
Sorry for the poison of my comment, but it is annoying not to be able to, at
the least, _hide_ articles.

Your idea, and the way the ranking engine currently works, leads to the
problem they're having on IMDB where people are strategically rating a movie
(Shawshank Redemption) to punish another movie (The Godfather).

I don't want to be forced to up-vote other stories I don't particularly care
for in order to punish one story. It feels like voting in a US or Canadian
election, where you vote for the other party to punish the current party. But
what if the other parties are just as bad as the current one? What if they're
worse but you still want a way to punish the current party?

~~~
raganwald
Don't forget you also have a meta-vote: you choose which sites to patronize.
When and if the posts on the front page no longer match your interests, it's
time to walk away and let the tragedy of the commons play out the third act.

I agree that it is very annoying not to be able to hide comments. I hope there
is some incredibly important reason for this. Maybe it is explicitly to foster
the kind of comment you made, to goad people into taking action when the
quality of articles drops rather than tolerating dreck and linkbait by
ignoring it?

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gleb
The money won't spend itself, not in any useful fashion. Usefully spending
money is work like any other, and is in fact exactly what a CEO/founder does.

