Developerfests vs Installfests

[Christopher Browne]

On 6/29/06, Ken Burtch <kburtch-Zd07PnzKK1IAvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-06-28 at 23:12 -0400, Rick Tomaschuk wrote:
> > A 'stunt' is a bad idea. I hate working for free. I still think one
> > event with many developer environments on hand to introduce to the
> > novice to the strengths and weaknesses of particular programming
> > environments for particular applications.
>
> That won't happen unless you can convince the developers that it is
> worth their time.  That is, to show financial benefit.  LUGS have no
> money to pay developers to overcome their intertia, unless they can
> justify it to their bosses as a day of work.

Did I, or did I not give several counterexamples?

The committee that is organizing the PostgreSQL conference next week
does NOT have money to pay people.  Nonetheless, many have expressed
interest in getting together to work on the software.

You guys are missing the point of how free software has come to be in
the first place.  Without people volunteering to write code, there
would be no Linux, no GCC, no GNU tools, no X.org, no PostgreSQL, no
Apache, no Perl.

There would be no Linux distributions, and there would be no TLUG.

Admittedly, it all exists, now, and people that are incapable of
imagining working on it "for free" can sponge off the efforts of all
the volunteers.  Indeed, people that are unwilling to do anything
without being paid can use the software without paying the people that
were willing.

Of course, what we've noticed in the community is that those are the
sorts of people that are the least stable members of the user
community.  Companies that are happy to "leech" off our efforts
without making any kind of contribution themselves are readily here
today, and gone tomorrow, when their perceived "business strategy"
changes.
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`||'s unless you think Gödel's theorem is for sissies'.
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