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What Does It Mean To Be an Open Source Author?
lolococo writes to tell us that Laurent Cohen, founder of the open source project JPPF (Java Parallel Processing Framework), has decided to share what life is like for an open source contributor in general and little bit about what that means. "There came a time of coding, releasing, coding, releasing. The project started gathering some momentum, as a small community of users started to use it, but why was it not working in this case, or why did it not have this feature, or how could I do this, etc...? You get the drift. Oh my, now I had to start interacting with other folks! What was I to do? That started a (thankfully short) period of intense existential self-questioning. What was the purpose of this project? Why did I actually open-source it? I resolved this by deciding unilaterally that it would be a free contribution, for whomever would be interested enough to look into it. I also decided that it was my personal responsibility to support these brave folks into using the project, and to make it, as much as possible, a happy experience for them."
Groupies. Lots of groupies. In that way it's a lot like Islam. There WILL be 72 virgins around you. Unlike Islam, they will be no guarantees that they are female.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No, it means having an always-accessable portfolio to show your skills without having to worry about making people believe you without proof, or "stealing" code from previous jobs.
It means "experience" for high school and college kids so that they can work on things other than the rather useless examples in the sheltered setting of academia.
At least, that's what it would mean if you leveraged it properly -- and that would mean further rent cheques from "real" jobs.
hell, maybe it means turning that side project into a real job that generates rent cheques -- even if those are the really, really rare exceptions.
Troll or not, there something about this perfect example of a jock being foiled by technology that deserves a +5, Funny.
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
How many computer science or software development courses include anything resembling:
To my knowledge, only a handful.
how to invest, a novice's guide
And that takes a lot of work. When I started my open source project it came as a bit of a shock. The first few emails I got from users were a bit of a thrill and spurred development. Then came support requests. And then every other point chromatic mentions. All of a sudden I found myself under "pressure" to implement features. It was not until I re-assessed what I was doing, and why I began doing it that the pressure lessened a bit (the project was to fill a gap and no project filled my requirements). I still listened to users, and fortunately most of the time their requests were things that I wanted to. But, at the end of the day, I was doing this for myself and I open-sourced the project just for fun and with the hope others found it useful as well.
Is that why Opera, a proprietary browser, far outshines Firefox,
Matter of taste, Personally, I think the various flavors of Moz brwosers are better right now than Opera, although there have certainly been times when Opera was ahead. Quantifying "far outshines" would be pretty difficult in this domain.
and why Mozilla corporation is recording record profits?
There may be a few ideologues who believe it's morally wrong for any F/OSS company to make a profit, but they're in a distinct minority. Most of us "FOSSheads" as you put it are glad to see F/OSS companies making money, because it shows that there's a sustainable business model there. Make no mistake, F/OSS isn't going away any time soon whether there's money to be made in it or not. But there will undoubtedly be more of it if some of it is profitable.
Your 13375P33X-ing "FOSShead" is a strawman. Most F/OSS users don't use it because it's morally superior. They use it because it's good at a partcular task, because it's available for a wide variety of platforms, and because the price is right.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
..that I met over the weekend, it means you're a "weirdo who ate too much paste as a kid."
I don't think that convinced the other guy to install a closed-source alternative to OpenOffice.