Re: more lockup laptop problems with dapper

Brian McKee wrote:
trying for a snark free zone ;-)

Somewhere to the left of Valhalla - watch that first step! :-)

and probably about 15 minutes after Ragnarök too.

I've no direct experience, but that certainly sounds right.
The quality of the participants is (always?) the biggest factor.

What do you think of the argument that says 'a labour of love done beacuse
the developer wants to do it' will produce better quality code? By removing
all that pressure, and making it easy for him to either sleep on a problem or
kick it around with any and everyone, doesn't that aleviate all those issues
you discuss?

to tell you the truth, if you don't love the code you are writing,
you'll write mundane boring crap code. I swear to God I love OS
internals. I absolutely love doing things with e-mail that makes most
users smile and most geeks grind their teeth[1] on different projects
when the various developers (myself included) loved writing code and
were committed to the product, we produced really good code that just
ran. In contrast, I've been on other jobs where we put in time because
we were flogged and of course, the code was relatively crappy (and still
my code was rated highest quality by peer review.)

extending this experience towards the open source world, yes I think the
highest quality code does come from people who love what they are
working on. I will admit my code quality has slipped over the past few
years because it is difficult to write code with speech recognition. I
really need someone to work with me to help me fix up various problems.

But it's really important to understand how the code is subsidized. For
me, it's a subsidy that comes from my consulting revenue. If I don't
make billable hours, I can't subsidize my own writing time. If I was an
employee, I would be minimizing my time at work and maximizing my time
on open-source. Why? Well, it would probably be more interesting than
what my work project was. :-) I suspect this latter condition is the
mechanism for funding much open-source software development.

Well, 'hiring' a programmer to produce code is certainly an option.
How do you 'make sure it's done right' though? I guess that problem
exists regardless...

but it's beyond my financial wherewithal to hire a programmer even for
small project. It's way beyond most people's resources to hire a
programmer especially if they work in a 9-to-5 job. Unless of course
it's exploiting the difference between first world and Third World
environment. But even then, think most people would be stretched

ass for "done right", there are a series of really good techniques for
defining "Done". I personally use completion criteria at a gross level,
and it's hard to write good completion criteria that mean anything. At
a lower level, you can use "programming by contract"[2]

I personally believe we have been training our users too much to expect
free (i.e. no cost) and not enough on how much it costs to remain free
(i.e. liberty). No matter what version of liberty you talk about, it's
never cheap.

Is that our training? or just a reflection of current society?
I do agree that there should be more emphasis on 'what actions you can do
that will help pay back' but hey - free means 'free to take what you want
and ignore the rest of that philosophy stuff' too right?

that's a good question. We have a lot of commercial advertising "free"
when in reality it's subsidized of a monthly fee (i.e. cell phones).
Other products are subsidized through cost shifting. Is the free
Coca-Cola you get with your pizza really free, just buried in the cost
of the pizza, or buried in the cost of future Coca-Cola purchases.

But at the same time, when you read articles about Linux, you typically
see people talking about free distributions and free software referring
to free of cost. So I think the answer may actually be that users are
primed by cultural message to look for something "free" and to pay for
"free" things by subsidy or cost shifting. So they come to Linux, get
something for free and then there is no mechanism to deliver money to
the people doing the work via subsidies or cost shifting. Whoops.

In order to close the final step, we need some mechanism for people to
deliver money and folks to apply for and get money. For example, the
trust ubuntu has earned may in turn also be applied to a payment system.
I.e. we trust ubuntu to deliver good releases therefore we will trust
them to deliver money to developers. We would need some way to detect
which packages are used or failing that, loaded onto the system. Based
on utilization, money could be delivered to the package developers.

Rough idea but it's like metering for software but not to punish the
user. It's only there to reward the developer if they want to participate.

I'm hoping the soft sell approach will make sure the largest number
of people possible will see it, and hook the people willing to think
about such things sooner or later.

it's really funny what catches the idea of various developers and what
doesn't. Like I said before, I have seen some extremely good projects
fall by the wayside and for reasons I can't understand. The only thing
I can see is that developers aren't good at PR and you must be good at
PR in order to have an open-source project become popular enough to let
you make money off it.

Bah - my reply was arguably worse than yours - no biggie, and
my apologies in return. I'm the youngest in a large family - a little
friendly abuse makes me feel at home :-)

firstborn child and firstborn grandchild on my father's side of the
family. Can you imagine the aggregate level jealousy aimed upward by my
cousins and sideways from my odds and uncles when they thought I was
going take over/inherit the family machinery moving business. No
friendly abuse there ;-)

--- eric

[1]think about a mailing list without a central node for mailing list
management. It's modeled on a non-flooding USENET propagation model.
unfortunately, no money, no time meaning the idea is sitting on the shelf

[2]http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/course/601/lectures/programming.by.contract.html


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