Slashdot Mirror
'Open Funding' For Driver Development
Doc Ruby writes "The TreoCentral community has announced a bounty for the first BlueTooth SDIO driver delivered for the Treo 600 (PalmOS 5). The thread shows the development of both the requirements of the quarry, and the contributions to the bounty. If this process works, is 'open funding' of development the next wave of the emerging online community? How will the 'traditional' vision/scope> requirements> features> >recode> retest> demo> cycle expand to include the user community in the financing?" Update: 06/16 19:43 GMT by T : Updated the bounty link to a server better able to handle it.
This is great! I certianly wish more companies would adopt this kind of a driver development model.
I know the GNOME Foundation has also done a similar bounty system, recently.
Isn't the quality of linux software rooted in that there are no timetables to get things working? It seems like quality comes from slow-moving community discussion and eventually a product. On the other hand, I would like to be able to throw money at some projects to get software faster.
Error: Id10t detected
There is a new website available and the estimated savings to the public sector is pegged at $56B / Year.
Help fight continental drift.
For those not in the know Rent-A-Coder is a site where people/companies put up software projects, and (get this!) coders bid on the project. Once a coder is selected, the client puts the agreed upon fee in escrow. All communication (in theory) is conducted through the website, so that in cases of despute, there is a clear papertrail. At the end of the project, the escrow company releases the money to the coder. Badabing, badaboom.
It sounds like a good place for young coders to get experience. In practice however, the overwhelming majority of jobs get placed to more experienced coders (read: RAC users with higher ratings). So even in the code-whoring business, the classic experience catch-22 remains in effect.
Would be nice if the J2ME bluetooth specification would be implemented on PalmOS. That way we could write real cross platform applications for handhelds.
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
There's nothing stopping a company to hire several proficient coders and start catching bounties, one at a time or several in parallel, is it? It doesn't sound as a terrible idea to me.
My journal. Mainly about freedom.
I can't RTFA to see how much the bounty is (slashdot effect), but how much do you want to bet that nobody will collect? One month and a half to provide a driver for proprietary hardware isn't very long if you're working on it in spare time, and I honestly doubt that the bounty equates to a decent hourly rate. Why such a short timespan?
Sure, if you have a job, you might not be able to spend extra time on writing OSS, but what if you don't? There are plenty of students who code, and could use some extra money. And with coding jobs being outsourced...
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This, to me, is what OSS has been missing- some form of incentive beyond the basic "I programmed it because it is neaty-keano". I may be a marxist, but I realize a basis of capitalism is rewarding people for hard work- or at least it's supposed to be.
This is an arm-chair economist viewpoint of the OS incentives:
Historically, there has been certain societies with a "giver" economy -- whoever had the biggest celibration or gave away the most gifts gained standing in their community. Some Polynesians and West Coast Indians had this economy.
Online, for Open Source, a giver economy works well -- one can improve their standing by being a well-known coder (ergo, being known for giving).
Don't confuse this with the other drive behind open source -- itch scratching. If I have an itch, and write a program to scratch it, unless I'm going to sell that program, it costs me very little to put that program online for others to download. Its not like a traditional commodity - once I give it away, I still have it.
The third possibility is that sharing knowledge (code) is good for a community (and its members) in the long run. Imagine two communities -- one community where the hunter tells the rest of his tribe his secrets, and another community where each hunter goes to his grave with his secrets. In the long run, which tribe will be more successful. "Shoulders of Giants."
Reverse engineering drivers should only be a very last-resort exercise. Why?
Because hardware vendors will continue to think it's OK to not release documentation because, see, people are able to write drivers without it.
Why would you help increase the market for a company with such an arrogant attitude?
Instead they should be punished through lost sales to their competitor who did release information.
And if there is no competition, you can still vote with your money. Simply don't buy the device. And if you already have the device, write an email to the company and explain that you won't buy their new device because they are not willing to support their existing devices.
Frankly, I'm sick and tired of hardware vendors not willing to provide documentation to developers. I write drivers for a living, and guess what? They are drivers not for Windows, not for Linux, not for Palm OS, not for QNX and not even for plan 9! No, I write drivers for embedded systems that don't use off-the-shelf OSs.
It's incredibly hard to get documentation from hardware vendors to develop drivers for a non-conventional OS. I usually have to go into begging mode, and promise that if they either give me the source of any existing driver or a form of other documentation, that I will NEVER EVER call them with questions.
What we do now is get that documentation FIRST before we design a piece of hardware into our product. It really narrows down our options, but at least we know we can use it.
I've started to apply this philosophy to my personal purchases as well. If a company is not willing to release proper documentation (meaning that I can use it the way _I_ want to), then excellent; I'll keep that cash in my pocket.
It seems to me that a better idea for this type of thing would be setting down criteria for a finished product, starting or selecting an OSS project for the product, and once the project meets the criteria, all coders who contributed to the project get a percentage of the prize based on the percentage of code or content they contributed.
Say I wanted a database interface for a recipe program. I want it to be able to import data from some of the more popular cookbook programs out there, Betty Crocker or whatever, and I want to connect to something that amounts to FreeDB for recipes to get recipes from the web. I want it to be able to convert recipes and I want it to be able to give me nutrition info for the meals. I want to be able to make a menu and print me a shopping list, I want to be able to put in prices and know how much I will be spending(approximately). I want an easy interface for entering new recipes, and if I designate it as an original recipe or one with no copyright restrictions, I want the option of uploading it to the database mentioned above.
So it seems to me I would be best off offering small rewards at the milestones, say 500 to 1000, depending mostly on budget, and a large one when it meets all the criteria. Now, and individual might choke on this, but maybe a hotel chain or restaurant chain would be willing to sponsor it, because it's a one-time expense that they can then use forever, or a long time, whereas before they were coughing up 2K everytime they wanted a new license, which adds up after 20 new restaurants. Then those same coders could turn around and put together a package of OSS software that caters to the needs of mom and pop restaurants, OO.o and the above idea, GNUcash, and whatever else they might need, train them how to use it and help them set it up for maybe 5k or so, wash rinse repeat, you have yourself a viable OSS business model.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809