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Slashback: Arch, Bubbles, Keystrokes
This research could still lead to new and powerful sink cleansers. mrsalty writes "A topic of brief and skeptical discussion back in april, Sonoluminescence as a fusion catalyst seems to be circling the drain. According to this BBC News article, new research shows that the collapsing bubbles' temperatures fall a bit short of that needed for fusion. A bit in this case being a few million degrees."
Discretion is sometimes the better part of avoiding attention. stinky wizzleteats writes: "Looks like OddTodd got off on charges that he defrauded the State of New York by starting www.oddtodd.com (Laid Off Land) while receiving unemployment payments. I didn't know he was only getting 67% of the take (his provider was getting the rest, which sort of explains why the site didn't get /.ed when the first story about him was run."
Try explaining this one to your parents. Earlier this year, we posted about Project Dolphin, an effort to measure the number of keystrokes you make as you IRC, email, program, whatever. Now, Wes N. a.k.a c3 writes with a largish update from the project's homepage, excerpting:
To this end, Dolphin has found itself its own dedicated server that serves as a home that is now (finally) suitably equipped to handle the growth we want to see, and fully expect. Previous participants will notice that this site itself has been fully redesigned and revamped toward a more professional look, while remaining commercial free in the original spirit of the project.At the very core, this is a research project for its designers. It's made by geeks and it's made for geeks. The positive feedback received over the last few months since its initial launch has ensured that it will continue along it's current path of growth in the spirit of fun and experimentation for the forseeable future. (end from website) The new version of project-dolphin's Pulse is due to come out any time now. The new version is supposed to have a few bug fixes and how loads of new features. to check how the progress is coming along check out The development website some of the new features include . Typing Activity tab, Keystroke Frequencies chart , and alot of other neat stuff check it out on the website or goto irc.project-dolphin.net #projectdolphin on IRC."
"Arch" is adjective, verb and noun in one. When it comes to replacing CVS, Subversion is not the only game in town. We posted in May about the even-more-ambitious arch revision control system. Now, bshanks writes: "Tom Lord, the author of the revolutionary arch revision control system (slashdot article here), needs some monetary help."
Looks like the judge agreed that the site was meant as a joke, even if he did end up cashing in - good for him, but I don't think I'll go into business being out of work :)
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
Could this perhaps be stealth R&D for SourceForge 4.0, which might perhaps act as a front-end for all types of source maintenance tools? Given VA's past record, they're not apt to be that savvy. Perhaps Taco et. al. are just trying to convince upper management that they need to do something Real Soon Now. Perhaps they desire to have said higher powers become so disgusted with /. that they will decide to sell it to someone like Salon or NYT so that the editorial staff can finally become real journalists like they always wanted.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm the CEO of BitMover, we produce BitKeeper, an SCM tool which has some similarities to Arch. We're quite a bit farther along, we're 5+ years old and have a fairly large team, so I have some idea of what it takes to turn something like Arch into a real product from what it is today, which is more of a work of charity or altruism.
We've been taken to task here and elsewhere for not making BitKeeper be open source. This is a reasonable opportunity for us to explain why we haven't done so.
Tom's managed to raise $10K this year in support of all of his fine projects, arch being only one of them. We're not trying to do everything he is doing, all we do is source management. The problem is that we spend $10K every day or so in salaries. And we are dramatically understaffed compared to any other SCM company, when they figure out how small our engineering staff is they are amazed that we are able to do what we do.
The reality is that we should be at more like $100K per day in salaries to really have a good product. The problem is that all you lovely slashdot folks want to get everything for free. And you'll insist on it if you can get away with it. Given that the SCM market is so small, the only way to get the money for the salaries is if you have a product which is based on IP and requires people to pay for it. Face it, if we gave BitKeeper away for free but asked you to support us with "donations" not one of you would do so. Remember, Tom is a really bright guy doing really nice work and he's managed to gather all of $10K this year. Which we spend in a day or two. And we're also really bright people doing really nice work, but that doesn't mean you'll give us or him money.
The point is that certain market spaces simply don't work based on the tradition open source support style model. That model works great for things where there is a huge market and the product is broken so you can ask for support and people will want to pay for it. That model fails completely if you ever provide a product which works. It also fails if the market is small.
The point is that if you want Arch to succeed, encourage Tom to make it a closed source product and get some funding and create a business. Anything less is a joke in poor taste. It's great to imagine that you'll get all your problems solved for free, but that's just not going to happen.
It's not what you want to hear but I can't help that. If any of you can show how to support the salary cost it actually takes to support a product like Arch/Subversion/BitKeeper/whatever with an open source business model, we'll happily do so. We would like it much better if we could. As far as we can tell, we can't and we can also see that Tom can't either. Prove us wrong. Show us how. We'd love be shown that we don't understand. Just make sure that you show up with $100,000/day rather than $40/day which is what Tom is raising.
I have hacked the keyboard driver in linux 2.4.18 and various 2.4.19-pres so you can check /proc/keystrokes to see how many you've hit since boot.
Anybody interested in me posting a patch somewhere?
FS/OS has a totally different model. It certainly needs funding, because pgmrs gotta have their Twinkies&Jolt [or is that now Carob&Gingsing?] :)
This funding comes _internal_ to the organization or individual.
They have a burning need for the code, so will fund it's creation.
This burning need drives the code creation, not some prospective
market. It is very likely that the code will meet the need [ROI]
-- not always the case in the commercial market.
The tricky bit with FS/OS becomes what to do with the code. The code [or more likely embedded data] might be so valuable that it is a competitive advantage. This code will never be licenced and guarded like the crown jewels. The code may be so duplicatable that you might as well give it away for the goodwill. Or now, thanks to Mr Gates, some managers will consider trying to sell the code. This usually proves awkward, since the producing entity usually looks more like a customer than a saleman, and will need all sorts of new functions.
The FS/OS model breaks down when there is no burning need, when the code becomes the crown jewels, or when people see no goodwill in publishing. I would have said that FS/OS isn't good for large GUI bloatware because no-one has that kind of burning need. But the existence of both Gnome and KDE proves that the World is a big place, and people have all sorts of needs and motivations.
In the specific case of SCM software, I would expect that a large organization that writes lots of software would have "the burning need". IBM, NASA, RedHat, the USDoD, MS, Oracle, SAP, CA, and looser organizations around Linux and *BSD come to mind. Many of these probably already have SCM in the "crown jewels" category, and the commercial software houses certainly aren't about to release code -- they're all about selling it. IBM might release code, and RedHat certainly would. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see RedHat fund `arch`. Patronage is not ignoble.
Yes, but that underfunds the projects. You can see this clearly when Microsoft can sell lots of buggy software and of the best OSS developers can't earn a decent salary.
I'd love to see a new license, that could be called the fGPL. That would be the "Funded GPL". To be able to use fGPLd programs you'll HAVE to contribute some small amount of money to the fGPL foundation. You'll not be required to pay for any individual fGPL software, just a plain simple yearly $10 or $20 charge. And you will be able to distribute exactly where that money goes, among all the different projects. If you can't pay $20 a year it will be no problem, just a bit penalty: all fGPL software would be free as in beer once the year passes (old releases).
The money paid to the developers would only cover salaries and some expenses that are needing to continue developement. So if any proyect gets over-funded, you'll be noticed that you must reasign some of your credits.
It'd always be free as in freedom. We only need to bring some beer for that to happen. It'll also kill the anti OSS argument that the system is for comunists or anti-american. I know that is FUD, but does your representatives know that? It will also kill most of the FUD targeted at OSS and will also bust developement to unknown levels.
What do we need for this to happen?
To have the Linux Kernel, the Red Hat distro, mplayer, X and gcc (for example) adopting the fGPL for the next releases. After that, we'll see most every GPLd program adopting the fGPL. After that, you'll start to see how much sense it made to pay $20 a year. And even the ones that can't pay (if any) will be able to use the software (though 1 year old, but their hardware si severla years old for sure).
This is my opinion. I'd gladly pay the $20, as long as EVERYONE ELSE pays their $20. That's why we don't see many donations now: because you have this filling everyone else is just waiting for a fool like you to contribute to project X in order to save it.
unfinished: (adj.)
Just a side note to my other post.
I really don't know why in this case the market isn't a perfect judge of the true value of this project.
It doesn't work well for two reasons:
1 - Market price reflects value when you can exclude people from using it if they don't pay a price. In any other case it means free-riding. This is why taxes are not optional (though the problem with taxes is you don't get to choose what public goods you do fund).
2 - Distributed development and a lack of a formal structure in the organizations: "Hey, pay me some money, i promse to keep working on this project!" is not good enough. There must be some way to make sure where the money goes and that it's used for that porpuse. This may not look like a problem but it is. For example, people are bidding to open the sources to Blender. But what happens if they don't reach the 100k limit? Donations are not good enough in the sense that companies try not to donate but prefer to fund (meaning the developer just can't do whatever he likes with the money).
That's about it. The misconceptions about the "market and it's benefits" are so widespread, but not their limitations. So I felt like posting my view (which is by no means different than what an economist will tell you)
unfinished: (adj.)
Yes, other projects need support as well. I regard myself as attempting to:
Is there a way to make money directly for creating new Free Software? In a few cases, those of us lucky enough to get money from users, sure. In the majority of cases, in the future, I think the big companies that use open source ought to come up with funding mechanisms (and fund them!), because that's a good way for them to spend their R&D budget.