Slashdot Mirror
OSI Announces Open Source Awards
JohnGrahamCumming writes "There's a story running on ZDNet about how OSI is going to be giving Open Source Awards with cash prizes of up to $10,000. The idea is to create the "Nobel Prizes" of Open Source. Announcement was made yesterday as OSCON with some big names backing the awards (e.g. Sun, OSAF and (interestingly) a major venture capital firm USVP)."
By participating in stuff like this, all we are doing is getting more profits into the hands of big hardware and software integration companies, and getting more people laid off. The idea of Open Source is great for these companies because they dont have to pay for development costs, and they can make bigger profits that way. Who gets the shaft? software developers like you and me. Every body else is happy because they can get very cheap software on multiple patforms all they paid for a few core developers.
This OSS stuff has has done to software developers what MP3 has done to musicians. Eveybody is happy with the free stuff except the innovators who have to scrape by.
Dont fall into this trap, sponsered by greedy hardware companies that couldnt care less about paying for software.
Makes a lot of sense. Venture firms in general have been hurting lately thanks to the depressing influence of the-monopoly-who-shall-not-be-named. If a little seed money can help break things open, it could pay off handsomely. Of course, having first crack at people with serious ability is probaby worth the ante all by itself.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Nobody deserves money for anything they produce unless they can and do sell it for money. Open source developers need to realize, and most of them do, that no one is going to pay you to create software on your own time. Sure, you can make money off of it by selling it to others, but if you're developing it for the sole purpose of giving it out for free, complete with source code, you don't deserve nor should you expect any sort of monetary gain.
It's nice that these awards are coming out, because maybe it will give someone a little more motivation to do what they were going to do anyway. But it's not going to produce more open source projects on its own, nor will it attract high quality money-motivated programmers, because if you're in it for the money, you're not going to be writing open source projects without a salary anyway.
I wouldn't suggest they award the money to unpopular projects (mine are mostly that way too.. well people use em but seldom contribute) but I would suggest they exclude projects that have funding. I guess I'm suggesting they not give money towards Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Gnome, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, Perl, Python and various other tier one projects. Better to encourage people to write apps that are needed but not as popular. Spread the wealth a little.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Nobody deserves money for anything they produce unless they can and do sell it for money.
This view of production is quite naive. Alot of stuff is produced that is not sold, even though the producers get money for their work. An example is mathematicians that produce mathematical knowledge, and are paid for their work by grants and/or saleries. Most mathematics that are produced are certainly not gonna be "sold" in the near future, if ever.
Programmers that are just motivated by money are usually not high quality programmers. They tend to leave an unmaintainable buggy mess after themselves.
There are Open Source projects that have paid programmers. An example is the Norwegian company Systems In Motien (www.sim.no) that have the Open Source 3D API Coin3D (www.coin3d.org)