Am 01.08.2010 23:07, schrieb Steven D'Aprano:
On Sun, 1 Aug 2010 03:33:15 am Florian Klämpfl wrote:
Am 31.07.2010 19:16, schrieb Steven D'Aprano:
On Sat, 31 Jul 2010 06:22:00 pm Florian Klämpfl wrote:
I think you miss one important point here: to contribute to an OSS project one must be rather idealistic or even religious about it (yes, this includes me ;)).
"Must"?
"One" in the sense of person obviously and contribute in the sense of coding or why should one code for free?
Who says "one" is coding for free?
You still didn't answer how much you contributed to OSS so far. How much did you? How much did you earn with it so far? Is it enough to pay your bills? If not, it's idealistic.
I develop OSS longer than the term OSS exists (acutally since 1993) and 99% of all developement is done for idealistic reasons according to my experiences and I met lot of people from a lot of different projects. Even if people earn money with it, a idealistic component is required due to poor payment.
Companies like Google, Apple, Red Hat and many others, pay programmers to work on OSS, not because of a sense of idealism but because it suits their business model.
This are a few big projects. Just ask the GPC maintainers how much man month they got funded so far.
And I noticed that you just skipped over the companies funding Postgresql development:
Not to mention idealistic and religious companies like Fujitsu, HP, Skype, to mention just a few...
So please, stop making out that OSS is solely some sort of idealistic crusade.
See above.
People contribute to OSS for all sorts of reasons, including business sense, legal requirements, and others.
This affects only a few big projects and a few people.