Very nice post.
------------------------------------------------------------------ Err, well some people spend their evenings researching and building their family trees, some build personal Web sites, some spend hours down at the gym, others write code and check it into open-source CVS repositories... I don't see what's so hard to understand about the process? Sure, a significant amount of open-source code is no doubt written on company time (just like portions of the early Internet infrastructure), a far less significant amount is (I'm willing to bet) is written by programmers on "welfare" (how many Linux kernel hackers would for one thing need to be on welfare, for another be happy with the pay deal?). This whole "unemployed Swedish hacker" thing is starting to sound like an expedient urban-myth rolled out by the Steve Ballmers of this world to excuse charging sky high prices for bundles of code routines that in *some* case are now globally-shared, intellectual commodities. If you want to find a more convincing reason why people are prepared to devote so much of their (or whoever's) spare time writing software, you might look to a certain software monopolist based in the North West of the USA who did for open-source what invading Iraq has done for militant Islam. As for Sweden possessing that long list of social and economic virtues, it's worth bearing in mind that the country is virtually a mono-culture with a high degree of shared-aspirations and values. If Sweden had the cultural and ethnic mix of the London Borough of Lambeth (where I live and where the local authorities have 132 (sic) different linguistic communities to serve), I doubt if that list of virtues would remain intact for long! Sorry this is all so off-topic... Roger ---------------------------------------------------------- You are subscribed to cfcdev. To unsubscribe, send an email to [email protected] with the words 'unsubscribe cfcdev' as the subject of the email. CFCDev is run by CFCZone (www.cfczone.org) and supported by CFXHosting (www.cfxhosting.com). An archive of the CFCDev list is available at www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
