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Hackontest — 24h Open Source Coding Marathon
maemst writes "Can you code 24 hours non-stop? Hackontest is a new Google-sponsored 24-hour programming competition between different open source projects. Its goals are to enhance Free Software projects according to user needs and to make visible how enthusiastically open source software is being developed. During the current online selection process users and developers of open source software may submit feature requests and rate and comment them. On August 1st, 2008 the Hackontest jury will pick the three most promising teams. Each team will receive a free trip to Switzerland on September 24/25, 2008 to participate in the competition located in Zurich. Hacking 24 hours inside an etoy.CONTAINER, the teams and their virtually present communities will implement certain features based on the online ratings and jury selection. In the end, the Hackontest jury evaluates the code and awards the winners with a total of USD 8500. The jury is made up of 10 renowned open source contributors: Jeremy Alison (Samba), Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Brian W. Fitzpatrick (Subversion), Martin F. Krafft (Debian), Alexander Limi (Plone), Federico Mena-Quintero (GNOME), Bram Moolenaar (vim), Bruce Perens (OSI founder), Lukas K. Smith (PHP) and Harald Welte (gpl-violations.org)."
Microsoft is a community of employees, bound by a common unifying theme: Make and support software, and get rich. The Microsoft "company" community has produced 10,000 millionaires.
The F/OSS community is quite different. There is a community, but only a few people at the top get rich. Other contributors will vanish into obscurity, never receiving a penny for their work.
You can be in the community of the rich, or the community of the poor, idealistic naive submissive fools.
It's your choice. You have the freedom to choose.
Remember who got the ball rolling? Richard Stallman, wrote in his GNU Manifesto (1984) http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html [gnu.org]
People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware, asking for donations from satisfied users, or selling hand-holding services. I have met people who are already working this way successfully.
That may have been true around 1984, before the widespread popularity of the Internet. It's not true that you could make a living from this now.
In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.
These insights were penned by the same Richard Stallman who championed the GNU Hurd, which 16 years later hasn't even entered alpha. When Linux rose in popularity, Stallman tried to take credit, and insisted that everybody call it "GNU/Linux". That's sort of like Microsoft trying to tell everybody to prepend the name "Microsoft" to whatever applications they build with Microsoft products.
Now, did Richard Stallman suffer? No: he received a quarter of a million dollars from the MacArthur Foundation for the creation of FSF, and invested the dough in mututal funds; he's living off the interest. (Plus, he has no children, no wife, and no car... ) If Richard Stallman had his way, nobody would " be able to make a living from programming." He would rather hear you say "Do you want fries with that?"
Remember when Eric Raymond wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", and convinced a dwindling Netscape to open-source its code? The net benefit was predicted to help Netscape and AOL destroy Microsoft. How wrong those naive optimistic projections became. Netscape is long dead, AOL's customers are deserting to broadband provided by other ISPs, and AOL and its clientele are still reviled by most computer professionals as unwashed trailer trash. Good PR stunt move, oh Netscape and AOL.
Around 1876, author Mark Twain wrote the immortal "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer". In Chapter 2, Tom finds himself stuck whitewashing a fence -- hard work he doesn't want to do. But then he comes upon a brilliant idea: Get other people to do the work for him for free! In fact, by feigning interest in his work, he managed to get other people to PAY HIM to do the work:
Tom went on whitewashing -- paid no attention to the steamboat. Ben stared a moment and then said: "Hi-YI! YOU'RE up a stump, ain't you!"
No answer. Tom surveyed his last touch with the eye of an artist, then he gave his brush another gentle sweep and surveyed the result, as before. Ben ranged up alongside of him. Tom's mouth watered for the apple, but he stuck to his work. Ben said:
"Hello, old chap, y