2. Even well-known, active coders only receive ~$200/week. The creator of Drupal looks like the highest-paid coder at $420 (I know Chad Whitacre is a coder but I'm guessing much of his compensation is for his valuable work on gittip?).
3. Yes, we've all read Cathedral and the Bazaar -- an influential work in hacker and open source culture. And we've all read his opinionated guide on how to be a hacker. But I had never heard or used any of his listed tools: reposurgeon, deheader, coverity-submit, irkerd, doclifter, and cvs-fast-export. Also, it's not clear if he wrote those or maintains them. I'm sure the GPS and gif libraries he maintains are important, but I wasn't personally familiar with them.
My point is: what is Eric S. Raymond doing these days, other than maintaining a few interesting repos? And why do we owe him a living?
On his site he claims "One way or another, I have a couple meg of code and documentation in the core toolset of every general-purpose Linux and BSD distribution in existence." Assuming that is true, would your opinion about 'owing him a living' be different? I'm not suggesting that it should change your opinion, but it's an interesting concept (to me anyway) to consider if one's unpaid past work that benefits many others is a legacy worthy of some compensation.
>One way or another, I have a couple meg of code and documentation in the core toolset of every general-purpose Linux and BSD distribution in existence
Is this true though? Wikipedia only lists CML2 (the rejected new config system for the kernel). Grepping through Ubuntu's /usr/share/doc doesn't turn up much either (libpng, libgif and some minor stuff).
I wasn't claiming it was or wasn't (those are ESR's words). My point was that if it were true, would the poster's opinion be different. I'd be curious as to how many people would actually pay past open source contributors due to some personal sense of obligation or perhaps respect.
Some in this thread are asking 'what have you done for me lately?', but would that feeling change if someone had done substantial (and assume again unpaid) work that comprises the foundations of today's preferred toolset. Just an interesting concept to consider.
I pay people (not many of them yet, but I like gittip and hope to do more) who I want to be free to create something interesting in the future. I do not see it as recompense for their previous work but as a way for me to help them keep doing the things that make us all great.
2. Even well-known, active coders only receive ~$200/week. The creator of Drupal looks like the highest-paid coder at $420 (I know Chad Whitacre is a coder but I'm guessing much of his compensation is for his valuable work on gittip?).
3. Yes, we've all read Cathedral and the Bazaar -- an influential work in hacker and open source culture. And we've all read his opinionated guide on how to be a hacker. But I had never heard or used any of his listed tools: reposurgeon, deheader, coverity-submit, irkerd, doclifter, and cvs-fast-export. Also, it's not clear if he wrote those or maintains them. I'm sure the GPS and gif libraries he maintains are important, but I wasn't personally familiar with them.
My point is: what is Eric S. Raymond doing these days, other than maintaining a few interesting repos? And why do we owe him a living?