Hi All,
I have been pondering the issue of the donation that John Carmack has
made to the Mesa developer community. My initial reaction to this was
to view this as quite a dissapointment. Whenever you throw money into
the mix with a free project, you can easily cause rifts amongst the
developer community. This is the reason why the POVRay ray tracing
project (of which I was involved in for many years) refused to accept
any monetary or equipment donations from corporate sponsors.
I understand that id Software wants to do something to make Mesa
better, and that Brian Paul obviously had to make a choice about who
or whom should recieve the funding. I don't envy Brian being in this
position at all, and the final choice of Keith W. was obviously one
that was intended to try to minimise the impact of needing to make
such choices. As usual people could question this and say that
although Keith W. has been making major contributions to the Mesa
development, he is not the only developer behind this and hence
perhaps shouldn't be the only recipient of the funds. If you go to
the other extreme, trying to figure out how to split the funds up for
multiple recipients is just as complicated and troublesome. At the
end of the day, it is very difficult to accept a no strings attached
monetary donation and do something useful with it without causing
jealousy amonst the developers.
Anyway, the more I thought about this and the more we discussed it
amongst ourselves here at SciTech, the more we realised that the
problem is that there is currently no mechanism for any commercial
organisation to put funding behind Mesa. id Software is not alone in
this regard, as I am sure that over the coming months more hardware
vendors may become interested in Mesa, and potentially want to
sponser some fo the development themselves. I feel the power of Open
Source is not necessarily that the source code was developed for
free, but the source code is Open and Available. It costs money to
develop code, regardless of whether it is Open Source or proprietry
(someone needs to pay for all the caffiene and twinkies the Open
Source hacker consumes!). Hence it makes a lot of sense to allow
corporate sponsors who will benefit from the Open Source project, to
sponsor some of the development - but we need a mechanism to manage
this.
The solution that we came up with was that there needs to be some
type of non-profit umbrella 'Mesa Developer' organisation. This
organisation would be responsible for recieving monetary (or
eqipment) donations from corporate sponsors, and farming out the
funds to all registered Mesa developers working on paticular
projects. In order for a developer to get paid for their work, they
would need to submit a proposal for the work they plan to do, how
long it will take and what it will cost. Then the developers getting
paid for such work would be working in effect as contractors on
behalf of the corporate sponsers. Of course some corporate sponsors
(such as us here at SciTech) may opt to pay their own developers
internally to work on Mesa, and contribute the code back to the
developer community.
I thought about this some more and realised that although this would
be the ultimate solution to this problem in the longer term, it would
also require a corporation with the infrastructure already in place
to build this. Then to my utter surprise, I saw the announcement on
Linux World:
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-05/lw-05-ora.html
This article describes how O'Reilly and HP are getting together to
start the sourceXchange website to debut in July. The purpose of this
is to do *exactly* what I have described above, allowing corporate
sponsors to sponsor particular published projects, and to allow
developers working on that code to get paid in cash or in kind.
So, I would like to start a discussion on this mailing list to see
what others think about this. I am sure there are more potential
corporate sponsors out there than just id Software, so perhaps we
should get in touch with the sourceXchange folks and register Mesa as
one of the projects.
Comments?
Regards,
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