Re: Funding GPL projects or funding the GPL?

[kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)]

davids@webmaster.com (David Schwartz)  wrote on 01.08.02 in <20020801201716.AAA20596@shell.webmaster.com@whenever>:

> On Thu, 1 Aug 2002 12:51:16 -0400 (EDT), Gerhard Mack wrote:
>
> >I don't get it.. he should know full well there are programmres out
> >there who will not provide good code no mater how much you pay them.
>
> 	Sure, and there are people who can't write a symphony no matter how much
> you pay them. But, believe it or not, the people who can write symphonies
> are more likely to get paid to write them than people who aren't. Or, in

Unfortunately, the computing field is full of counter examples to that.

They tend to follow a fairly simple logic: If I hire an unskilled worker,  
I can pay him less; the problems with that approach only surface in one or  
two years. Then I simply replace one monkey with another monkey - assuming  
it's even still my problem and I haven't moved to a different job  
meantime.

Thus, as Alan said, the .com bubble.

Thus, Microsoft.

> other words, there will tend to be a strong correlation between how much a
> person is paid to write symphonies and how well he or she writes them. This

Unfortunately, reality does not seem to bear that out.

> is because in general the people who control the flow of money tend to pay
> the people who write the symphonies that meet their needs.

In general, that's exactly what they don't do. In fact, this not happening  
in reality is exactly why the Berne convention was written to reserve  
rights for half a century after the death of the creator.

> 	For an individual given programmer, in most cases code quality won't
> correspond to financial compensation. You can't pay a randomly selected
> person more and more money and find them writing better and better
> symphonies. However, if I had to get a symphony written by any means at my
> disposal, the more money I had, the better the symphony would be.

I really, really doubt that, *unless* you *yourself* already understand  
(and I mean really *understand*) symphonies to start with.

Unless you can judge the quality of composers yourself, the money is  
rather unlikely to buy you a good one.

MfG Kai