(fwd) article on open source

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

John Abreau <jabr at blu.ORG> writes:
	  ...
	  4.  The most efficient royalty system is based on the lines of code p
	roduced
	  by each developer as a percentage of the total lines in a final versi
	on
	  that's shipped and sold.

Au contraire, this is about the worst  possible  basis  for
rewarding  the  programmers.   It is incredibly easy to pad
code to produce a large line count. And this doesn't reward
the  author for including documentation, which is "comment"
rather than "lines of code".  Such a  reward  scheme  would
produce  huge  bodies of code with little functionality and
no documentation.  (Much like a lot of commercial code.)

Of course, it's easy to come up  with  other  schemes,  and
it's  also  generally  easy  to think up ways of subverting
each of them.  But just about any other quantity is  better
than "lines of code".

I've been in a few discussions among musicians about how to
pay  people.   As  a  keyboard  player,  I  tend  to  enjoy
suggesting that people be paid proportionally to the number
of   notes  they  play.   Of  course,  musicians  instantly
understand that this is a joke.  It's  funny  that  in  the
software  biz,  people  not  only  don't  see the joke, but
actually implement this sort of reward system.   Then  they
wonder why their software is so bad.

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