Re: Coffee and Open Source

[mike808@users.sourceforge.net]

> OK.  But in your analogy, management killed off the free coffee because
> of unintended usage of a scarce resource.  And it was related to product
> activation, which is fundamentally an act to restrict copying, not
> creation.

Just as the DMCA, Jack Valenti, the MPAA, the RIAA, Sen. Hollings from Disney,
and friends are all working hard to create a scarcity of a resource (IP),
and justify their restricting copying to preserve their business model.

IMHO, the MPAA and RIAA are the Vanilla Ice of IP - still singing their 
one-hit wonder 90 years after their 15 minutes of fame were over. 
Not to worry, tour extensions are being planned now.

> Yeah, but we don't need a majority of users to work on something, just a
> persistent minority.

But it's the disconnect between what the minority is willing to create (what 
meets their interests) and the demand by the majority to meet their interests.
We just haven't figured out a good mechanism for connecting the two, since
the GPL and other OS licenses remove the economic incentive. If money
can be considered a "universal translator" to exchange value, and we've
no ability (yet) to scale this for open source development, then how does
the majority incent the minority to create software to meet their needs?

Commercial software solves this problem by using money and aggregating
(roughly) flat-fee pricing. Bill G gets $100 for each MS OS sold (er, licensed).
That big pile of money is what he uses to incent his workers to create
more code. In the OS world, I can offer a coder money to create code, but
I don't have a way to aggregate my need/offer/incentive with anyone else's.
Brian Behlendorf's Collab.net project looked promising, but hasn't taken off.

> Unfortunately, the only examples of this that exist today are
> proprietary: BitKeeper, Perforce, etc.  Right now, the best OSS/Free
> version control system is Subversion;

BitKeeper can be free and open source, you just can't use it to write
other CVSes - e.g. banning Subversion developers from coming near it.
I don't get much worked up about people's choice of licenses. Its easier
to just be disappointed that they didn't strive to choose a better one.

I agree with you on your point that distributed commits and changesets are 
important. I've got some ideas on this, and they seem obvious to me, but I 
don't know how common they are to the folks coding. Thanks for the tip on 
Subversion. I'll see about where they're going and if they have found the 
same information I found. In short, I think the problem of distributed 
commits to databases has a direct link to this problem in CVSes. But this
stuff was worked out in the early 90's, so I didn't think it would be this
long before somebody correlated the two, as I did a couple of years ago.

Mike808/

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