In our little corner of the programming universe, I think that most
anyone
only has time to skim, collect some valuable tidbits, contribute
answers as
time and mood permit, then go on with our lives.
If I decided to follow this path and contribute, my wife would kill
me.
That's a very important point. I tried with similar projects in
education. Everybody is interested in having things made available
for free. Nobody is much interested (1) in taking
*responsibilities*... that is you are the one eventually working all
night to put everything back together in case a hacker decided to put
your site to the test and (2) in helping to fund the development of
"open" content or "open" source that would *immensely* benefit the
community in the longer term. So at the end, if you have been crazy
enough to start doing it, you end up being the one doing 90% of the
job that needs to be done, and on your hobby time.
Materials is easy to contribute. A clever and reliable
infrastructure, responsibly managed and maintainted, to host that
material often comes with a price tag (at least months full time).
For instance, I can afford to have my websites because maintenance is
made easy... thanks to the web hosting service I *pay* for (http://
www.ukhost4u.com/). Not much, I pay less than £5 a month, the price
of a computer magazine and I have a lot more fun playing with my
websites, I learn a lot more by getting in contact with interesting
persons via my websites. But what I pay for the web hosting gives an
idea of what would be required for a good infrastructure and a
quality service. Given the actual size of the revolution market,
assuming that a maximum of 200 persons are ready to pay for the
service (and this is overoptimistic, closer to reality would be 50),
about $5 a month per user should be collected for it to be viable
(worth the amount of time spent on this).
Who on this list would be ready to pay $5 a month... for an
infrastructure that largely exploits the material that comes out on
the mailing list anyway? Would you prefer to pay less but have the
website filled with ads?
Marielle
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Marielle Lange (PhD), Psycholinguist
Alternative emails: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage: http://homepages.lexicall.org/mlange/
Lexicall: http://lexicall.org
Revolution-education: http://revolution.lexicall.org
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