Slashdot Mirror
Dotgnu Coding Competition
Honestly writes "Apparently DotGNU seems to be offering more than the 'warm fuzzy feeling' to its contributors. Somebody has funded about $4500 worth of prizes for code contributions. The developers have confirmed that the $$$ is in FSF Hands (good hands, I suppose). Here is the split up of prizes. It's almost strange to earn money writing open source. Especially when you're not even
employed by dotgnu. Anyway all I can say is ,I like it. It's ideal for a grad student with lots of free time. But hardly anyone seems to have seen
the Newsforge posts (except maybe me)."
It's almost strange to earn money writing open source.
No, it's not. Linus, RMS, AC, BP, among many others have been getting paid to write free software for years.
Part of the stigma associated with OSS is that since it's associated with "volunteers," it is considered hobby level. Lots of people get paid to work on OSS, and ever increasing large software companies (e.g. IBM and Apple) have staff members working exclusively on OSS.
why have two projects at all?
Perhaps, because different projects might come up with different implementations that have strenths that the others might not.
Sometimes a parallel effort is needed in order that different approaches to the same problems get to be explored fully.
Because it is sometimes better to fork a project, not because one approach is "wrong" but because another is equally good.
Because it might be better to merge to separate efforts later when both have more mature codebases.
Because having two separate projects nmight enable the coders to more easily see alternative methods that neither effort would have thought of without the other.
Because there is more than one way to do it.
Read, L
It's a prize, not a wage.