Re: Google Summer of Code 2006
On Fri, 21 Apr 2006, Charles Plessy wrote:
For administrative reasons, it is much easier for a company or a public
service to buy rather to give an arbitraty amount of money. You can not
send $100 to free software developpers, even if you saved $200 by using
Debian or another downloadable distribution. Just think about the many
blanks on the order sheet!
I can only answer from my personal point of view. I'm in the situation
that I do not have to earn money from my Free Software work. I have two
reasons to be engagend: At first my work on Free Software saved me from
spending some thousand boring hours in front of a TV set or something
like that - so it is just fun to spend spare time on a reasonable thing
instead of wasting it. My second reason that is especially Debian-Med
related is to make Debian good enough te become an acceptable alternative
to the system that is currently used in the medical institute I'm working
in. This does not belong to the specification of my work I have to do
and so I do it in my spare time but perhaps this will change in the
(distant) future. So if anybody else want to make profit from what
I did this is fine. I do not expect anything.
I think that the commercials distributions which could be build on top
of mature CDDs can solve part of this problem, as instead of giving, you
can buy a box and a manual
Well, writing manuals was not really part of the fun I listed above.
So even if writing manuals is very important I will not earn the money
you are talking about. This is the work of somebody else who *should*
earn this money but it is enough if he *only* writes the manual for
the techniques we develop (for him and his users) *internally* because
this would allow other manual writers for other user fields to basically
copy and paste / enhance the writing style of the technical part instead
of inventing the technical part from scratch.
for an arbitrary price to somebody who can
then support free software (Not taking into account the services which
can be sold at the same time).
But I'm thinking of the services they should base on CDD techniques.
One part of the service might be to give back code into the internal
CDD techniques to make them better also for others. So I'm thinking
about giving code to Debian instead of giving money.
Kind regards
Andreas.
--
http://fam-tille.de
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