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A new survey of over 9,500 developers, of whom 4,400 actively participate in open source, finds that 54 percent of respondents feel that individuals should be paid for their open source work. How does 50 cents a bug sound to start?
Creating or removing, it doesn't matter, does it?
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Let me preface my comments by saying that 87.6% of statistics you see on the Internet are made up...
Surely the majority of open source projects have no money, since they have no monetisation plan (or ability to generate one as an independent entity). So no one is going to get paid for contributing to such a project.
The comparatively few projects that are big, growing, successful and who do have money (or whose contributing companies have money), already have employed contributors. E.g. As an extreme example, most Linux Kernel contributors are being paid for it by their employers and are in fact doing it as their day job. (If volunteer coders wish to contribute, is there any discretionary fund to compensate them? I don't know, I'm curious.)
This leaves the probably relatively small proportion of OSS projects that are important but still have little or no funding. An example of this category would have been OpenSSL. We only realise that these under-funded, largely volunteer-contribution projects are in such a vulnerable state when one of them is compromised.
In summary, open source development is riches for the successful few (employees of major contributing companies or superstar devs) and hope and hard work for the majority. Like most areas of endeavour in life, I guess.
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Isn't that called "having a real job?"
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I am waiting for my CP points to get translated into real money
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Sure - one point is worth approximately one dollar.
A Zimbabwean dollar.
Circa 2015.
The Zimbabwean government stated that it would ... exchange Zimbabwean dollars for US dollars at a rate of US$1 to 35 quadrillion Zimbabwean dollars ....
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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That can work : Dilbert Comic Strip on 1995-11-13[^]
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Oeh; I wouldn't stop them. Last few bosses refused to include the name of the 'ware we used, even if that in breach of the TOC.
If half of the people using my code pay me, I go fulltime Rimworld.
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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I see two main classes of OSS:
Either, commercial companies making good money and pay their developers well, and will try to improve their image in the market by opening the source code but not really expecting (maybe not even wanting) any significant contribution to the software base. A subclass is hardware manufacturers publishing their drivers for someone to port to the other OS, to increase the hardware sales - that is another way of improving their image.
(Note: I know a lot of developers making contributions to OSS code bases maintained by others: Their companies make heavy use of free OSS, and their contributions to extend/modify the OSS is what they would have developed as proprietary software if the OSS was not available. So these developers are well paid by their own company, and act as an extension of the first OSS class.)
Or, someone developer not much above the amateur level (or maybe not even above), doing software development in his/her spare time, publishing the code to boost their image as great developers.
There sure are other classes of open software, but these I see as the major ones. The first group needs no payment. The second group ... Well, some of it doesn't deserve any payment. I can see that a clever amateur (/dilettante) might hope to earn some money on his hobby, the way some other hobbyists do.
But I don't see who should pay them. End users of the software? Making mandatory some sort of begging routine in all OSS, activated at every run? Or a begging mechanisms for other developers that they have to get through before they get access to the open source software?
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Whatever happened to programming for the sheer joy of doing it? I've been programming for over 40 years - because I like doing it. I feel lucky that someone would pay me to do something I do as a hobby.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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#realJSOP wrote: I feel lucky that someone would pay me to do something I do as a hobby.
I've been programming almost as long, and still feel the same way. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people out there who see it as nothing more than a well-paid job.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Microsoft is posting a message on its Windows 10 release information page that versions 2004 and 1909 of the OS are now ready for broad deployment. It's safe: only nine months after first release!
Sorry for those expecting a new icon. I guess we have to wait a while longer.
modified 5-Feb-21 10:36am.
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Your link seems to be wrong - it takes you to an article about Assessing your site for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Dang. Well, that’s more important. Fixing
TTFN - Kent
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Of all the scientific disciplines, pure math, also known as theoretical math, is arguably one of the most cerebral. They invented something to keep office chairs warm?
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A team of physicists from Israel has designed...
xkcd: Physicists[^]
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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A mathematician is not a physicist.
As for Israel..
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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The vast majority (90%) of businesses believe software developers played a critical role in overcoming competition during the pandemic, research published by Twilio states. Huzzahs all around (but probably no raise, sorry)
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To ensure this experience is as good as possible, we have been working on optimizing Visual Studio to handle solutions that contain large numbers of .NET 5 and .NET Core projects. You can move on up from 'Hello world' now
"We have also seen a decrease of up to 25% in crashes reported due to resource exhaustion." <- And there was much rejoicing...
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Quote: "We have also seen a decrease of up to 25% in crashes reported due to resource exhaustion." Let me guess. They run GC more often now?
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A novel artificial intelligence (AI) approach based on wireless signals could help to reveal our inner emotions, according to new research from Queen Mary University of London. That's strange, everyone is grumpy. Something must be interfering with the WiFi.
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The systems have a little help from conventional computers. "What’s in the box?!"
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Let me ask you a question: How much value do you think your source code has? Enough rope, as they say
If source code isn't valuable, try writing a program without it
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Kent Sharkey wrote: How much value do you think your source code has? Kind of mandatory[^]... again
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Let me ask you a question: How much value do you think your source code has? I didn't know when I wrote my first article. I killed an entire company with my first article; it was on UNDU, before CodeProject. If printed, less than two pages worth.
The company was "ExceptionalMagic"; they sold a package that would give Delphi users the exact file and line of their exception, like VB already did. And I wrote an article, explaining the same, using the map file (a debug file) to map the memory location to a disk-location. It was a pricey product, and I gave the source code away. Along with some explanation on how it worked.
And added a bloody large bug that only a beginner could introduce, causing any app to use it to take minutes to shut down. In Delphi, you don't delete the first item of the list to clear it. If you delete the last item, all oke. But deleting the first item means reallocating the memory and copying the damn list. Took five minutes on our software on shutdown and some stern looks before I realized my mistake.
Dunno how large the company was and dunno what it was worth. I don't wanna know either, I was young and there was code.
..later on, I progressed to a 14.000 euro bug. But that's another story entirely
Bastard Programmer from Hell
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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