On Mon, Jun 07, 2004 at 04:39:28PM +1000, Mary Gardiner wrote:
> copyright holders earning income from granting extra licences, not
> people who've signed their copyright away in exchange for royalties from
> such sales.

The issue I see in this model is the problem of valuing contributions.  How
do I, as the mediator of this model, work out who gets what money?  Purely
by LoC has all the usual LoC-productivity problems[1].  $N/contribution
means someone who rewrote the whole app gets $N, someone who contributed 15
patches gets $N*15.  If it's on the judgement of the lead developer or
something, you *will* piss off people whose contribution you don't value as
highly as they do.

As someone who might be in a position to implement a system of this ilk in
the nearish future, I'm interested in discussion points people might like to
bring to the table.

- Matt

[1] LoC doesn't take into account the actual difficulty of writing the code,
and some people can be far more verbose than others.  There's also the
problem of what do you do when you throw out someone's contribution. 
Actually, that goes for all of the systems of value evaluation, and you have
to track when someone's contribution gets superceded or purged so they stop
getting paid.
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