Slashdot Mirror
Adopt a KDE Geek
sultanoslack writes "In an effort to bring together KDE hackers that are students, unemployed or by other means lacking in hardware and capital with users in that have spare goodies, Adopt-a-Geek has been launched. More details are available on how to help out. Been wondering what you can do to help out? Here's your chance!"
I think it's cool.
:)
I remember when was I younger I had to stop coding for almost year when my power supply blew and I couldn't afford another one...
It put me behind my classmates (the good ones that is) - a year of knowledge is quite a lot
But if you *really* want to help out.. why not get in touch with some of the organisations that rebuild old computers to ship them to developing countries (with Linux as the running OS)..
i belive techsoup.org has a list of organisations near you
Suchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
Thinking back to the useless hours being wasted trying to crack the X-Box encryption, how much of this compiling could be distributed? Obviously it wouldn't accelerate live debugging or optimizing tools, but what if there were networks of computers who people volunteered to standby and remotely download, build, and upload code, and a linker on the initiating machine to reassemble globals, etc?
I know nothing about distributed compiling, which probably means that either A: I should go back to college (very likely) or B: compiling doesn't break down nicely into chunks.
If it is possible, a network of volunteer Open Source compilers would probably build in a significantly faster time than many of the aformentioned older systems can, assuming no major bandwidth bottlenecks, and would probably find a rather large home of OSS and Free Software supporters who don't have the time to code as much as they would like to. Such a structure would probably support the compiling of any large linux project, such as X, or Gnome, or... err... Well, Kde, X or Gnome. Any of these projects would be worthwile.
Someone with more experience, please stand up! If it were possible, many people would become that much more involved, and the community would prosper. Could you imagine teams of people competing to help out the KDE developers as much as they do the seti@home project?
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
KDE runs extremely slow on anything less than a 500MHz PC with 128mb of RAM+ and that's before you start running applications ontop of that. Maybe the KDE developers should develop a more efficient desktop that doesn't need such powerful systems for the task it performs.
Building KDE on my modern desktop (1.4 GHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM) takes 6-8 hours, what BS! Maybe they should rewrite the entire system if that's the case.
If you use KDE (I personally prefer WindowMaker), I recommend you DON'T donate higher-end hardware to them, it will just give them a chance to create an even more inefficient system and they'll turn around and say "well, it works on my Athlon XP 2800+ with 1Gb of RAM..., I guess your one year old computer is just toooooo slow to run our inefficient X beautifier.".
Which is surely a good summary of the problem with the open source model.
The first problem with the open source "model" is that there isn't one, at least not in the sense of a standard, documented business model, or even any realistic idea about how "all" software could be produced by it. In other words, there are a thousand open source models, and none of them are really complete. That means you have to define precisely what you mean by "open source model" before you criticize it, else you're just attacking a strawman, and one whose details are known only to you.
I can't see this model ever scaling to the point where it 'employs' anything like the number of people currently working on commercial coding projects.
Aside from the question of what model you mean, exactly, why would you expect open source to 'employ' that many people? More on that below.
You need some way to collect the money, on the basis of what work is the most useful. And the conventional way to do this is called a company in a free market.
The problem with these statements is that you're assuming your conclusion. How? You're thinking only about the world of off-the-shelf packaged software as the way in which software is developed. In fact, only a small fraction of the world's software is developed that way. The vast majority of the software that is written is in-house, custom software. And the majority of software developers are employed in writing this sort of application.
Here's a more realistic view (in my opinion, at least): There will always be certain categories of software that will be produced primarily in the for-profit-software-company style. Some people, particularly those who run or work for for-profit-software-companies would like *all* software to be developed that way, but there's a great deal of software that can never be written that way, because there's just no market for it; it's too application-specific. Finally, there's a goodly chunk of software that can benefit tremendously from an ("an", not "the") open souce approach. Most of this software falls into the category of "infrastructure" -- operating systems and their components, development tools and libraries, basic office and business applications, etc.
Now, all of this software, from all categories, is needed. People want it, and they're willing to "pay" for it. Some of this "paying" is in the form of donated labor, equipment, etc., some of it is in the form of a P.O., and there are other forms as well. A fundamental rule of economics: Where there is adeqate demand, a supplier will step forward. People want the software, ergo, it will get written, one way or another. And only programmers can write it. And programmers must eat. Therefore, programmers will get paid for writing software, one way or another.
It *is* possible that open source software will reduce the number of programmers employed in writing software, but if it does it will be because of the greater efficiencies provided by open source. All of those programmers hacking out in-house, custom apps will have this massive base of tools and almost-right applications that they can use, so they can do the job in less time, with less effort, less people and at less cost to their employer, freeing up that capital to be employed elsewhere.
And that, my friend, is unarguably a *good* thing. Sure, it may mean that the world needs fewer programmers, but that's also a good thing, since it frees up all of those smart people to apply their effort and intellect to other, more valuable tasks. The only way that all of this could be bad would be if it got us into a situation where the software we needed could not be produced, maintained or supported, and economics would not seem to permit such a situation to exist.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.