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I am currently managing an open source project (please see gimp-print.sourceforge.net for details). It's an infrastructure-type project -- providing print services for the Gimp. I believe that a royalty scheme would have a lot of effects, almost all undesirable: 1) Any time somebody submitted a patch, I would face a conflict of interest over whether to accept it -- accepting it might make it a better piece of software, but at a cost to my income, and the improvement in the software quality might not be enough to offset the reduction in royalty fraction. 2) Coders would have a great incentive to pad out their code to as great a degree as possible. There would be no good reason to write terse yet readable code; the financial incentives would encourage writing code as verbose as possible (assuming that lines of code is used as a metric). That's not hard to do by a variety of means: use excessively long variable names to force code to wrap over (relatively innocuous), write frequently-used code snippets out in longhand rather than encapsulated as procedures that are called (harmful), use very complex algorithms rather than simple, elegant ones (really pernicious). 3) People would lobby hard to have their code included in projects, rather than the code deemed to be best by the maintainer and/or the rest of the project team. In the interests of equity, maintainers would be pressured to include code by certain people (Tom's having trouble paying the rent this month...please include his code so he gets paid), and other people who are simply better politicians would now have a stronger motivation to deploy their political skills. 4) People do open source projects for a variety of reasons. In some cases, people explicitly want to get out of the rat race or may have non- or anti-capitalist motivation. Must everyone be forced into an explicitly capitalist model even if that isn't their motivation? 5) Large and medium corporations and governments would have considerable incentive to avoid open source software, or at best (?) would prefer "their" open source software, based on motives other than what best meets their needs. I don't want to be a "new nobility" at all. I like developing software, but I don't like the sound of "nobility". A pure meritocracy, like a pure just about any political system, tends to be harmful in its own way. My only comment about "capitalism works best..." is that capitalism != free market. Capitalists seem to thrive on certain government-imposed restrictions on the free market (patents, copyrights, laws restricting competition), and try to impose their own restrictions (gain enough market share to permit rigging the market against competitors, restricting information available to customers to prevent them from making fully informed decisions, and so forth). I certainly don't object to developers being paid, but I don't think that a piecework model applies very well to software. Lines of code are not fungible in the way that sweaters are. But that's not even my most serious objection -- the real core (as John Abreau notes in his reply to this piece) is that this proposal essentially suggests eliminating free software, and indeed the concept of community where everyone shares in the outcome, altogether. It doesn't bother me one bit that Red Hat, SuSE, VA, Epson, HP, Canon, et al. will be the immediate beneficiaries if our gimp-print project does well (I cite the printer companies because they'll presumably be able to sell more printers with good Linux support). I'll also benefit, in the form of having better print quality myself, and from the code in the project donated by other people. Not to mention that I learn new skills from doing this. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu> http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/ Tall Clubs International -- http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2 Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net Project lead for The Gimp Print -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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