Upside on CoSource's Leap of Faith

Chris Fischer writes "Here's a great article on UpsideToday about CoSource.com, entitled CoSource's Leap of Faith: Bridging the gap between open source and the free market. This positive article offers insight into what CoSource is about, what they've been doing, and their goals for the future. "

Comments

Co Source is in trouble!

[Travoltus]

I patented the idea of collaboratively funding open source software development through e-commerce.

(heh)

Warning: Travoltus has obtained the Rampant and Uncontrollable Patenting of Everything I See Patent.

Some thoughts

[jd]

First, there's an excellent article on www.gnu.org which documents a psychology study on how much of a dis-incentive "incentives" are. If this report is anything like accurate, it blows the entire basis of CoSource out of the water.

However, it's not all doom and gloom on the horizon for this pet project. IMHO, there -are- sectors of the programming market which coders are not efficient at getting to, through volunteer work alone. The key word here is "efficient" - coders can do ANYTHING, given enough time. Even write document, and add comments! It depends on how long you are prepared to wait, though. It can be better to pay some pleb to do all the grunge work, instead.

Second, throwing money at a project doesn't make any difference -unless- it's: (a) targetted, (b) a useful amount, and (c) spent flexibly, AS NEEDED, rather than at some accountant's whim.

Open Source doesn't need money. Money needs Open Source, though, and Open Source -can- be encouraged to take advantage of any resource.

As Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, "It's a case of who's master, that's all."

P.S. Talking of commercial minds and Open Source, the source code for Ian Bell & David Braben's "Elite" has been posted on Ian Bell's homepage. Now, -there- is a project that deserves money & programmers!

Re:Some thoughts

[Arandir]

"First, there's an excellent article on www.gnu.org which documents a psychology study on how much of a dis-incentive "incentives" are."

That's one report stacked up against thousands. It's also contrary to reality. What exactly do you do to acquire money to exchange for food, clothing, shelter, bigger monitors and ethernet cards? It's all incentives whether it's labeled as money or not. If you employer pays you little but you greatly enjoy your job, you may decide to stay. But if someone offers you more money for doing to same work across the street, you'll certainly think about it.

Hackers like to hack. Give a hacker the choice of programming for $75,000+ a year, or waiting tables for $12,000 a year, and you'll see how powerful incentive is. Now give them CoSource and the opportunity to pick and choose the projects they're interested in and odds are they'll jump all over it.

A technical difficulty...

[Chalst]

It seems to me that the main difficulty is deciding whether code
satifies the requirements of the contracting party. I remember this
issue being hashed out in previous slashdot discussions, and I don't
recall ever seeing a good system proposed. How does one arbitrate a
dispute where the programmer maintains his code is up to scratch and
the contractor says it is not? If one doesn't get this right then
opportunists could potentially swamp any good work done under the
system.

An idea that doesn't solve the problem, but at least has the
potential to limit abuse is to associate with each coder and
contractor an `employment profile' which lists the contracts offered,
code supplied and any disputes that may arise. Coders and contractors
with a long history will build up trust, and so not suffer by
association with opportunists.

Free software is part of the free market already.

[Frater 219]

Free software doesn't need to be made into a part of the free market -- it already is a part of the free market. The "freedom" of the free market is non-coercion: a free economy is the opposite of a command economy, in which economic activity is controlled through the use of force by the government.

You can have a free market without money exchanging hands: for instance, a barter economy or a gift economy. Provided that the economic acts of individuals -- the creation and exchange of wealth -- are not restricted "from above" by a government or similar entity, the market is free.

Already free software is competitive against proprietary software in the marketplace: consider the case of Apache vs. MS-IIS for instance. Is a user's choice of Apache over IIS a choice made in a free market? Of course it is. It is a choice made, after all, without coercion. The user picks the Web server s/he will use on the basis of price and performance (with the latter including support, stability, &c. as well as speed). This is economically a free-market decision.

So why in the world would someone characterize the CoSource effort as moving free software into the free market if in fact free software already is part of the free market? I'd say it was out of fear of free software -- the old misguided Red-baiting, in other words. Unfortunate, that.

Re:Free software is part of the free market alread

[Wah]

So why in the world would someone characterize the CoSource effort as moving free software into the free market if in fact free software already is part of the free market?

To get non-developers involved. There are a lot more people that use software than create it. It's moving the demand for new or special software away from only the developers and adding end users into the mix.
Basically, trying to create an environment where a clueless end user can say "Here's $500, Scratch my itch for me." And hopefull the "free market" (via CoSource) will end up with someone who can and is willing.

CoSource is a way to move free software DEVELOPEMENT into a more market driven (vs itch-driven) model. (and if you don't like it, don't use it, flaming me is useless.)