

JS Git - mooreds
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/creationix/js-git/posts/430922

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matthewrudy
$12,000 a month sounds like a commercial rate (roughly the London Ruby
contracting rate). Do these open-source Kickstarter projects normally pay
themselves so well?

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dasil003
It's not a rate (all the backers are paying a fixed cost of their own choice),
it's a salary. Why should someone take a pay cut in order to produce an open
source project?

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pc86
Please tell me where you work that $144,000 isn't an obscenely large salary.
He doesn't live in San Francisco or Manhattan or London, he lives in Texarkana
where the cost of living is a substantial percentage below the US average.[0]
I have no doubt that you can live well in that area on 1/3 of what he's
asking.

I'm not saying the guy should work for peanuts or that people who work on
F/OSS should do so with no financial upside, but let's stop pretending that
$12,000 in a month is a normal salary or something that doesn't need at least
_some_ justification. Clearly people think it's worth it and that's great, but
the whole tone of "I have $12,000 and now I can _afford_ to work on this for a
month" just makes me sick to my stomach.

[0]
[http://www.bestplaces.net/cost_of_living/city/texas/texarkan...](http://www.bestplaces.net/cost_of_living/city/texas/texarkana)

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dasil003
For the kind of developer who is implementing git in javascript in a month,
$144k is definitely in the realm of market salary. Obviously this is more than
most people in the world make, but if you just reject it as greed outright you
are ignoring the real problems of corruption and dirty money happening in the
upper echelons of society.

To me he's offering to do something, being up front about the cost, and you
can take it or leave it. I see no moral justification to start prying into his
expenses. You don't know how big his family is, or what debt he has, or how he
spends his money, so who are you to judge him? If he makes this money in the
private sector then I see absolutely nothing greedy about proposing that same
salary on a kickstarter, but beyond that I don't see that it's any of your or
my business. He's not enriching himself through arbitrage here, he's simply
putting a price on honest work that has an outsize public benefit.

There are so many real financial injustices in the world that I just don't
understand what angle you're coming from here. Do you believe individuals just
shouldn't be allowed to make more than a standard deviation above median
income? Or is does it have something to do with an ideal that F/OSS should
distance itself from real money? If you were offered a job for $150k would you
turn it down because it feels like selling your soul to the devil?

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tqc
I wish him luck, though having implemented a significant part of git in
JavaScript myself, I wonder how well the end result will work - JavaScript
does not do well with either large downloads or processing binary data, and
git involves a lot of both.

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alexjeffrey
Javascript is getting better with at least the latter thanks to typed arrays -
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/JavaScript/Typed_ar...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/JavaScript/Typed_arrays)

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tqc
That's a start, but it's more suited for smaller tasks I think, with the main
benefit being that you don't have to clutter your code with type conversion. A
string with custom (no) encoding does fairly well for holding the binary data
as is.

It was actually memory/GC issues that got me to give up on the js
implementation - it's very hard to prevent js from creating huge numbers of
temporary variables, which then cause the system to freeze for several seconds
while they are cleaned up.

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ryanackley
Awesome project idea but it seemed like this was just on the front page 3 or 4
days ago.

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drbawb
You're absolutely right, this was on the front page.

I think it's worth nothing though: this is an update: when it was on the front
page it still needed backers. -- Now the project has met it's goal, and the
author has added some stretch goals.

I personally think that it's reasonable to post an update and stir up more
interest for the newly defined stretch goals.

Maybe some potential backers will be more interested now that they see the
project has met it's goal?

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espadrine
> I think it's worth nothing though

You're harsh.

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eric_the_read
Probably just a typo for 'noting'.

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drbawb
Yes it is!

