|So why do programmers research, innovate and
|program for free?
|It is hard to tell, and there are probably
|several reasons.
|Could ask similar questions on other kinds
|of work where the money is small and often
|not the driving force: Why does a painter
|paint, a music composer compose music, or
|a poet write poems?
|When asking OSS programmers, painters,
|composers and poets, you often hear that
|they feel a "calling". Also these people
|want to make themselves heard (and
|sometimes immortal), and earn respect among
|their peers.
|It is worth noting that the hacker culture
|is a gift culture, not an exchange culture.
believe me Ole, i have been there. I have given and given and given. We are
facing serious needs now that go beyond the "calling". The calling got me
going 2 years now and got me to self maintain as long as I could, in fact
burn my savings. I am again beyond exhaustion now and so is rickard, in
fact it is getting so bad that i just have to face the music.
Find money or die.
So I face it, and I listen to what people tell me, to the 1000 inputs that
make a good idea. I even hear your idea, that we all know the reason *we*
came here. I am looking for ways to generate enough money from our
activities to maintain a full time dedicated core that manages growth.. I am
looking for the best way to make JBoss a big big big time success.
Yes we could get "jobs" a la redhat, and I am a bit more ambitious than that
for me and my fellow developers. I believe we can earn a good living at our
trade, our trade being JBoss. The reason is that I place my peers before
many other things. I will find a way to get many of us to the point where
we can survive and even thrive financially. That is my goal.
|I do not oppose money in open source
please...
|projects, but I always worry a bit if the
|details of distributing it may take too
|much time away from real programming.
|Also, I have never seen monetary funding
|as the driving force of an OSS project.
True, it is becoming a "sine qua non" condition for our continued expansion.
I am talking about maintaining that "force" even funding it so that if
someone needs to spend 4 month developing an EJB 2.0 CMP engine (for example
;-) PLgCMP) he can! Imagine JBoss as an orange and the "peel" as our growth
rate. We are financing the core and peel.
|But I have seen extra-project enterprises
|do commercial support for OSS projects
|with great success, even if free support
|is available on mailling lists. And this
|success seems to trickle back to the
|project in the form of (often hard-to-find)
|bug fixes and better commercial acceptance.
Obviously that is one of the things we are trying to structure with JBoss
Group. We intend to get many of the folks that do it today to do it for a
fee for those folks that just "cruise by" and are eager to get payed
support. Mailing lists are still our training ground and core JBG
developers are full time on JBO.
|IMO, we need a vendor giving commercial
|support for JBoss, and we need it a lot
Yes, we do it ourselves. We try to grow it ourselves over time. We know
our code, we know our server. WE train we do the whole 9 nine yards. We DO
IT OURSELVES.
|more than direct funding. And I wouldn't
JBG will thus generate funding for JBO
|mind if such a vendor keeps all their
|hard earned money, as long as they
|contribute bug fixes back to JBoss, and
|help making JBoss more commercially
|acceptable.
yes I do believe you put your finger on something real. If you are fully
free, businesses don't take you seriously from the outside and from the
inside all you face is burnout. We are looking for a way to grow a
succesful business model from within a succesful open source group. WE are
working beyond the "Linux" hype and it is the next wave of business and
technology.
I truly think you must be part of it.
|Just my $.02.
maybe it is worth 1000x that...
marc
|
|
|Best Regards,
|
|Ole Husgaard.
|
