Re: [ox-en] sell your free software "lifestyle" business for nine figures [u]
- From: Michael Bouwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Fri, 25 Nov 2005 17:20:35 -0800 (PST)
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Thanks. Your reaction in fact confirms the non-reciprocal nature of peer production, and lays to rest concerns related to equity, i.e. that some profit from the efforts of the many.
I'll read your article on funding with great interest. What do you think of government funding. A recent report by CEP, a left wing think thank in the U.S., which proposed that the government would fund competitions for OS projects, did get a lot of opposition in the Slashdot commentaries, seemingly from a libertarian bent. Is that a general feeling inside FS/OS communities, or a peculiarly American thing?
Michel
"Benj. Mako Hill" <mako debian.org> wrote: Again, I apologize for the very late reply here.
Well, imagine the following two situations, I hope that makes the
distinction clear.
So there is a given open source project, with a core of lead
programmers and a multitude of small contributors.
Some venture capitalist is interested. Two options are open:
- some of the leading individuals "sell" their leadership and
expertise of the project, and become rich in the process
What do you mean by "sell"? People are usually paid to either work on
another project that is based off of the original project (i.e., a fork)
or to continue doing what they doing but to do it more frequently.
It's perhaps also worth noting that becoming rich is hardly the rule.
- a cooperative venture is created, so that if there is a business
interest, all the members of the cooperative can benefit, not just a
few
Part of the problem is that the voluntary nature of the work makes the
contributions incredibly difficult to quantify. Things are just too
ad-hoc and quantification schemes (e.g., lines of code) don't work and
qualification schemes don't scale.
Let's take Debian for example. Few developers seem happy with the idea
of breaking up the spoils down the middle when some people are doing
orders of magnitude more than others. Of course, quantifying and
ranking that work is also incredibly problematic. We can also add to
this the complication that many people who are contributing are already
doing so as part of paid labor that is tangentially related. Things get
messy fast and I've never seen a free software project introduce paid
labor successfully.
As far as I'm concerned, large projects are better off not paying
*anyone* and by letting outside organizations and individuals handle
this.
I've documented a bit of this in an essay I wrote on financing
voluntary free software projects:
http://mako.cc/writing/funding_volunteers/funding_volunteers.html
The problem is to find ways to avoid that a few benefit from the work
of the many.
I think one issue is that situations are not always read this way by the
participants. When another Debian developer gets a job based on his work
on Debian, I feel happy -- not like I'm getting ripped off. When I cut
code, I don't do it with the idea that I'll get stock options out of it
in the future. If that were my interests, there would be other ways for
me to spend my time.
Regards,
Mako
--
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako debian.org
http://mako.cc/
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